I'd love for the Googles of this world to really make things easier for people not as familiar with technology. For instance lightswitches do not have a pause button.

If the lights in your living room total up to 85.5W, someone with access to fine grained power consumption logs can infer when you turned that light switch on or off.

Similarly, there's going to be a telltale power consumption profile for when you're in the shower, when you run your washing machine, when you turn on your television, etc.

This isn't widespread, but it's something to look out for going forward.

But being an EU citizen, I'm confident that they can't turn it on, legally, without explicit permission.

And GDPR is taken seriously, the EU requiring and sponsoring agencies that check for compliance in all EU countries.

Don't know how it is in the U.S. but I imagine that at the very least you can group with others in class action lawsuits, such that the effort of any one individual will be lower.

As long as it is illegal of course, otherwise you don't have a case. I heard California is adopting something similar to the GDPR too.

All over the page.

Paused this, paused that.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?visit_id=...

The bigger cost is to people's privacy, which is hard to quantify and hard for people to articulate why it's necessary. Collection and use of people's data is opaque and not at all transparent.

Which is why GDPR and other privacy legislation is needed.

Anyway I just get cynical when I see people talk about how evil Google is and how Apple protects privacy. Every company you do business with WILL sell of your personal data and that includes mobile operators, banks and ISPs. Until that is illegal the entire discussion about privacy is irrelevant and a sham.

Google can fuck right off with their location tracking. When I got my phone, it defaulted to asking me invasive questions about places I was visiting. The option to turn off those nag screens was hidden so deeply I felt compelled to neuter the entire shebang. Disgusting dark patterns.

Screenshot taken just now: https://imgur.com/a/ewSCeRn

My next phone will be an Apple device due to this insidious crap.

This kind of insidious crap is the reason I've never considered Android as an option.

I have two Android devices for work, and they both stay in my work desk drawer. I'd never take them off campus.

Location history wasn't ever needed for remembering searches, FWIW.

It absolutely was. When I tapped on the search bar, there were no results and it told me to turn on location history.

It was really annoying, because there is no back button in the app, so if you search for your hotel, then for a restaurant, and then want to show the hotel again, you had to type the full address again.

They seem to have stopped doing that, it's now possible to use Google Maps on iOS without signing in, and you still see recent searches.

They still display a message "sign in to get better search results". And a second message: "Add your phone contacts to search for their addresses". But it's a lot better than it used to be.

The number is small enough that I pretty much can directly remember the thing I was thinking about, and why I searched for it. I don’t even want my device saving my recent searches.

Which is what we are talking about.

Its something you can probably build off the shelf - log position with durations, draw vectors on Open Street Maps. But Google has already given me the convenience in exchange for my privacy. Its one of the rare times I'm alright with that tradeoff.

Your phone is perfectly capable of making this map on its own. Why does it have to share all that information with the Google mothership?

Apple's phones do the same thing, but don't send your personal location history to Apple. (Though I believe the history isn't a full seven years.)

I've tried a lot of automatic backup solutions like syncthing but have had myriad performance or inconsistency problems over the years.

Its tied to my Google account rather than the physical device, and its not data I need to manually somehow keep consistent across devices because Google does it for me.

It's certainly possible to develop user-centric software with the same functionality and polish, at a grassroots level. The fact that the industry is being dominated by VC money looking for scalable winner-takes-all growth is indicative of the magnitude of what's really at stake.

I sympathize with the plight of those unknowingly being spied upon - I've had enlightening conversations with family members when I show them this very feature they weren't aware of on their Android devices - but it often feels like the demonization of Google treats it like nobody ever volunteers in. Because I definitely wouldn't pay for it, but its a nice service to have.

Apple's phones and computers do this, too. This is not unique to Google. What is unique to Google is that Google uses the information to profile you, while Apple just uses the information to draw a map.

- When you install MicroG/Google Play Services, they take over location services (i.e. they run in /system/priv-app, and if you disable their location, location on the device is disabled totally).

- Android by default has the default on option to scan wifi and Bluetooth when you turn them off to find wifi/bluetooth and coorelate it to your location.

- On my Pixel C, when if I try "high accuracy" or "battery saver" mode Location services, Google Play has tried to force me to agree to their location tracking and I have disagreed every single time. Location services does not work if I use "device only" (which is supposed to only use GPS).

- I have noted that on my phone now, if I disable location and then reenable it when I have moved more than 20-30 miles, the GPS has to reacquire the signal and can take up to 2 minutes (I also tried it when I drove several hundred miles, it took several minutes to reacquire). This is indicative of the GPS module being off totally. This was not so when it had Google Play Services on, it was able to reacquire my location extremely quickly, sometimes almost instantaneously even if I moved a long distance. I suspect that Google Play was still tracking my location even if I turned off location services (due to it totally controlling my location).

- EDIT: Another interesting note is that on my phone has had location services off and then turned just back on (i.e. no GPS lock), it appears to give the last time GPS was acquired as my current location. OSMAnd shows that location but says it doesn't know my location, but other apps do not realize that. I am suspecting that Android does not necessarily have a "stale" location, just the last reported location.

Putting my tin foil hat, I hypothesize Google anonymously tracks your location even if your location services if off (allowing them to do traffic, how busy a restaurant is, etc.).

EDIT: As correctly pointed out, networked assisted GPS is a thing, and may also play into the differences in GPS reacquiring. I believe that network assisted GPS is in AOSP. When I turn on and off GPS in Android, it appears to have the almanac for where to look for satellites based on SatStat, and how quickly my phone acquires the GPS signal is a function of where it used to be compared to where it is now. In addition, UnifiedNLP [1] scans for networks/cell towers and correlates it to location, it does not appear to implement networked assisted GPS. [1] https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp

This is more likely access to network assisted GPS.

To know your location, the receiver needs the GPS ephemeris and almanac data (basically the status/location/trajectories of the GPS satellites). This is transmitted by the satellites themselves, but extremely slowly (50 bps with the entire navigation message taking 12.5 minutes)#.

To speed things up substantially (almost instant vs minutes), this info can be delivered over the network instead. I presume that in your case it was being provided over the network as part of the Play services.

# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Navigation_message

[1] https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp

Thanks for explaining that. It explains why when I interfaced a GPS receiver yanked out of a 2001 minivan it took so long to lock into a location with my Palm Pilot.

This has already been reported.

https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

I'm used to European cities, crowded, but without skyscrapers and in my city GPS is very reliable, but I realized that's only because we don't have tall buildings.

> - Android by default has the default on option to scan wifi and Bluetooth when you turn them off to find wifi/bluetooth and coorelate it to your location.

What the actual fuck?!

For the curious:

https://www.google.com/maps/timeline