I don't remember the brand, but a smartwatch brand's activity feed was public, and the some military personnel bought these, and trained around the military bases, leaving nice outlines secret bases, complete with their GPS coordinates.

Then that thing was banned, again IIRC.

That’s just what a default is. I think it was Fitbit? Fitbit got lame for me after. Every one’s feed was private even for basic info. It was unnecessary to make everything private by default for the average person except to combat all the blow back from the PR of that story and vocal people like many on here.

It’s not disssimilar to how Cambridge Analytica gave FB an excuse to clamp down on their API and put much more content even more in their control. The API for many things became useless after the clamp down. Not that a response wasn’t required.

However, in both situations, it was like throwing the baby out with the bath water

While I'm by no means an absolutist about not sharing personal information, I disagree in this case. Location data can be pretty sensitive and defaults are powerful. I don't want my location being shared by some device or website unless I've explicitly given it permission to do so.

It can be a tricky tradeoff. For example, I think the blowback around Apple AirTags and Find My Network is way overblown. But I do draw the line at sharing my location tracks and related absent checking a box somewhere in a menu.

The response wasn’t to not share location or specific detailed info. It was to set everything to private by default. The actual issue was not the only thing fixed with the response. Everything was taken away. That’s why I said baby with the bath water. Facebook did a similar thing when they reduced what their APIs could do and what any normal user could do using FB themselves. In both cases, the actual issue could have been solved without the amt of stuff they did.

Once Fitbit hid basically everything by default and almost no one changes defaults, it was hard to know if a user was even using Fitbit or not without already being friends with them.

Edit: I agree whole heartedly. Whatever specifics were done with location sharing is not good and shouldn’t be done by default. I am pretty open with my location, but it’s under my control and I’m usually actively opening up my privacy and location. 100% agree there and also agree over the excessive reactions to AirTags