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iOS 11 Location Privacy: "Only While Using" is now always an option for users
- runesoerensen 9y agoRelevant HN discussion for context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085098 Related screenshots: * Uber requesting location access: https://twitter.com/joeduvall4/status/872007928844345344 https://twitter.com/joeduvall4/status/872007928844345344 * Apps using background location now displayed more prominently: https://twitter.com/ow/status/872145515386982400 https://twitter.com/ow/status/872145515386982400
- tfoil2 9y agoNext battle: getting Apple to give users more granular Location controls. Almost NO App really needs precise GPS. "within a mile" or city or zip code or other fuzzier locations should be fine for most apps. Users should have a better trade-off than exact or nothing.
- weeks 9y agoAndroid 1.0 had this via ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION, unfortunately Android only recently got runtime permissions.
- matt4077 9y agoApple still has it: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/EnergyGuide-iOS/LocationBestPractices.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40015243-CH24-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...
- zkms 9y agoAs long as it's deterministic it'd be super great -- otherwise some devious programmer is just going to average out the random fuzz factor :)
- lm2s 9y agoThe banner for apps using location while in background seems like an iOS bug... If it isn’t, Apple should give an option to turn the banner off.
- gigatexal 9y agoFantastic. Screw Uber for only having the option to always use or never use.
- tfoil2 9y agoScrew any app that really thinks it needs my precise coordinates in the foreground, let alone the background. Turn-by-turn directions in maps is the only exception I've found in 10 years of iPhone use.
- vlozko 9y agoApple's API don't discriminate with regards to precision. An app that shows nearby stores with a 1km radius precision requires the same level of permissions as an app that's trying to do 1m precision.
- pawadu 9y agoUnlike Android which have precise and coarse location. If Google wanted, they could limit precise to GPS and similar apps and force everyone else to use coarse location or geo fencing. Unfortunately Google doesn't care about your privacy. In fact, it's only a matter of time before they remove coarse locations and/or give every app full access to location data (the same way they did with internet access).
- matt4077 9y agoApple's API allow very fine-grained control of both the accuracy and frequency of location updates, depending on, among other things, running in the foreground/background, the user's location etc.: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/EnergyGuide-iOS/LocationBestPractices.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40015243-CH24-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe... There's currently no explicit penalty for requesting too much information, but the battery power indication could probably get users to uninstall apps wasting energy, and it can even get you app terminated.
- hutattedonmyarm 9y ago
- winteriscoming 9y agoI like all the new things coming in iOS11, including this. I recently got my first iPhone and it's on iOS10. Do users like me get to upgrade just the OS on the same handset when they release iOS11? I haven't found the answer to this on some of the apple articles I have browsed.
- tfoil2 9y agoYes, upgrades are always free, and new iOS versions are typically supported on several generations of older devices.
- winteriscoming 9y agoThank you.
- laingc 9y agoAs a concrete example, iOS10 runs reasonably well on my spare iPhone 5, which is coming up on 6 years old.
- rimliu 9y agoHowever iOS11 won't be supported on iPhone 5 and earlier, i.e. on 32bit devices. Only iPhone 5s and up.
- jclardy 9y agoTo put it into context - the iPhone 5 was in competition with the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Nexus at launch.
- lazerpants 9y agoAnd my Galaxy Nexus stopped receiving updates 2-3 years ago despite it being a Google device (mine was also straight from the Google store, so it wasn't the carrier's fault).
- rem1313 9y agoYes, finally!! Can't wait for the final version
- dingo_bat 9y agoThis is amazing. I hope Google takes a lesson from this for Android o. I manually deny location permission to uber after every ride.
- bad_user 9y agoGoogle's own apps are crippled when you disable "location history", e.g: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en So I wouldn't hold my breath.
- aetherson 9y agoAndroid O will sharply reduce the amount of location access an app has in the background unless the app displays a user-visible notification.
- HugThem 9y agoI wish there was a way to make apps only able to do anything when I use them and nothing when I don't use them.
- otterley 9y agoI believe there is. Simply go to Settings and turn off Background App Refresh for that app.
- tfoil2 9y agoYes, turning Background App Refresh off goes a long way toward achieving this (and saving battery). Even with Background App Refresh turned off though, some activities may continue, particularly Location, audio, voice, and the like [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/iP...]. This is why it's Location "While Using" is important. It also looks from OP's comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14502423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14502423] that (some of?) these features will be more prominently displayed to users. This is good, users should have complete knowledge and control of their devices, particularly as it affects privacy.
- yakult 9y agoDo apps still have access to location history data? If so this is a nothingburger.
- c517402 9y agoExactly my question. Buried deep in location services is a frequently visited locations that apps have access to even if they only have access "only while using." http://www.iphonehacks.com/2016/10/how-to-turn-off-hidden-feature-iphone-secretly-tracking-everywhere-you-go.html http://www.iphonehacks.com/2016/10/how-to-turn-off-hidden-fe...
- dvcrn 9y agoI didn't know of that, thanks a lot for sharing!. Reminds me of the Google Location history on Android devices that shows you scaringly accurate where you went during your day.
- Sephiroth87 9y agoI'm pretty sure 3rd party apps don't have access to that data anyway...
- rimliu 9y agoiOS has access to these, third party apps do not.
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- jclardy 9y agoYes that exists, but you are wrong about the permission requirement. CLVisit is meant to be a lower power alternative to always tracking, but still requires the same “always” permission: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/getting_the_user_s_location https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/getti...
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- khana 9y agoThe RIGHT thing to do (even if the reasons are less than pure of which I'm sure). Now onto more control of streamed content..
- breatheoften 9y agoYay! I almost always use lyft now because Uber only allowed the "always on/never" location options. Occasionally I'd be somewhere where Uber was the only option and it was annoying to go into location services and manually perform what should be a system function ...
- pthreads 9y agoI wouldn't even turn it on when Uber was the only option. I would enter the street address manually.
- NietTim 9y agoAwesome! I never ever turn on location, but this one app requires it, and there is no way to set it to 'only while using', got annoyed and now I toggle it, not ideal. This is great.
- apexalpha 9y agoI hope this comes to Android. I always thought it worked like this until someone showed me: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb I see way more locations and rides than I actually navigated to with Maps. For most of the time, it is just installed. I now manually disable all location services.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoWon't disabling location history avoid this or have you tried?
- nolok 9y agoThere is a specific option to let them do that. It's accessible both from your phone and web browser. It appears on the very first page of it, that you linked to, at the bottom, "pause location history", in a big box the same size as the other major points, it's even listed before the list of your known "common locations" such as home and work. I'm not saying it shouldn't be opt in rather than opt out, it should, but that's still a far way away from hiding it from the user. PS: I'm a very big user of permanent location history and it's a feature I enjoy, I would actually like to make it more granular / precise with more regular updating of my position if possible.
- micheljansen 9y agoThis is great. There are a lot of apps that are a hassle to use, because I have to enable/disable their location access before/after using them to protect my privacy and battery. Looking at you Waze et al.
- jquast 9y agoI've uninstalled Waze multiple times, being reminded that it has been accessing my location in the background while sitting at home relaxing always upset me.
- dghughes 9y agoBut it's a map app thats its nature.
- allover 9y agoThere's no good reason it should do so when backgrounded.
- MengerSponge 9y agoThere are almost a billion good reasons for it to track your location all the time. http://www.jpost.com/Business/Business-News/Google-announces-acquisition-of-Israeli-app-Waze-316177 http://www.jpost.com/Business/Business-News/Google-announces...
- natch 9y ago>There's no good reason it should do so when backgrounded. Wrong, and it's especially irksome that just because you cannot think of a good reason, you leap to the unfounded conclusion that there is no good reason. When you are driving and not using the app and not even thinking about the fact that you have the app, and not planning to use it, it can still be gathering useful traffic information to help route other users according to the current conditions on the route you are traveling. By the way this takes a super negligible amount of power because it can piggyback its use of system services (location, data transmission, etc.) on top of other already running services.
- DavideNL 9y agoI really like Apples pro-privacy stance, in contrary to Google & Microsoft. Hopefully sometime soon Apple will also encrypt iCloud contents so data from non-american people (europe in my case) is protected against the US government prying eyes. Our data/privacy seems pretty well protected inside Europe, but in America we seem to have 0 privacy rights (America first...!)
- rscott 9y agoMost of iCloud is encrypted at rest. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
- kingnight 9y agoInteresting omission of iMessage here... since it's not encrypted at rest on their servers.
- andrewksl 9y agoI can't tell if you're implying that they store iMessages unencrypted, but iMessage is encrypted end-to-end. Backups of your phone, which may or may not contain message histories, are only encrypted at rest.
- kingnight 9y ago^ I am implying that they are storing iMessages unencrypted. The iMessages on iPhones/iPads are part of the 'backup' for each device and they are not encrypted at rest on the iCloud server.
- aeontech 9y agoYou sound very sure of this, what's your source? As far as I've read, the iCloud backups have always been encrypted at rest, and Apple is apparently working on improving it to the point where they do not hold any decryption keys to the backups [0]. That's why, when you set up a new device, up until now it would not have your message history - because the message history can only be decrypted on devices that are already-authorized. If you restore a backup in its entirety, that includes the message log and the encryption key, but if you set up the device as "new", you only get the newly received messages - since it needs your password to decrypt the backup, it had no way to decrypt the message history from backup on the cloud and only sync that down to the new device (which always bothered me in terms of convenience). I think they're working on improving the usability of it in upcoming releases though. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/25/apple-working-on-stronger-icloud-backup-encryption-and-iphone-security-to-counter-fbi-unlock-requests/ https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/25/apple-working-on-stronger-icl...
- 659087 9y agoI'm leaning towards picking up an iPhone next, just to show some support for the solid pro-privacy stance Apple has taken in recent times. Uber isn't going to be happy with this at all, and that's a great thing.
- Quenz 9y agoWhy would Uber be unhappy?
- 659087 9y agoA few months ago they changed their app so that iOS users no longer had the "only while using" option for location access, and announced plans to stalk users even after their rides had ended.
- djrogers 9y agoRecently Uber updated their app to track and report users' locations even when the app was not being used.
- technofiend 9y agoThis is why IOS needs profiles. It's that or you just uninstall the app after each use, which is a pain.
- allendoerfer 9y agoWe could try to build a network to deliver applications, which would stop when you close them. We only need a system to map names to ips and some standards for protocols. We could even run them in a sandbox for security. Would be awesome.
- jackskell 9y agoI'd like to specify whether an app runs over my VPN on an app-by-app basis. Maps and Pandora, no, browser and email, yes.
- crsmith 9y agoTo users, will this affect location-based actions? (Like Google Inbox delivering an email upon arrival to a location.)
- hprotagonist 9y agoi bet uber is _thrilled_.
- deagle50 9y agoNice, I might start using Uber again.
- ksk 9y agoWhile this is an awesome feature, they're also going to start disabling 32bit apps that I paid for, and use regularly. Damn!
- simonh 9y agoIt is annoying. My kids play some games on their phones I downloaded back in 2009. Lemonade art and is one. The game doesn't even appear on the App Store anymore and only works with older versions of iOS, but if your phone is compatible you can still download it from the 'Purchased Apps' section. All that will go away, but on the other hand I really don't expect them to support 32bit apps forever. You always have the option of simply not upgrading iOS. It's a trade off.
- ksk 9y ago>You always have the option of simply not upgrading iOS. It's a trade off. Unfortunately, Apple gives you no way to opt-out of updates. I've figured out a way to block them at the firewall level, which seems to work, for now.
- eridius 9y agoApple doesn't force updates. You can simply ignore the OTA update. I believe you'll get prompted again every time a new update is released, but hitting "Ignore" occasionally is a small price to pay.
- ksk 9y ago>Apple doesn't force updates. Constant popups _are_ the means to force updates. In addition they also throw up a nagware screen where they trick you to enter your pin to schedule updates. Apple employs several dark patterns, on iOS, and also on MacOS to trick the user and its rather sad to see them follow MS/FB/Google. >I believe you'll get prompted again every time a new update is released, That is not true. They do it multiple times for the same update. Look, I wouldn't care if they were simply security updates, but Apple updates bloat up and slow down the phone over time. On top of that, what makes it even more egregious is that they make it impossible for me to downgrade, and go back to a state where the phone was working just fine and I was happy with it. >but hitting "Ignore" occasionally is a small price to pay. You make it sound like its once in a year. Unfortunately, Apple constantly nags you to the point where, unless you're constantly looking out for it, its easy to accidentally hit the wrong button. Its sad that they have had to resort to tricking the user to drive their update stats.