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This is sophistry, privacy in the sense that a private company is not continuously compiling a list of every location you visit throughout your life.

growse 9y ago
Claiming sophistry doesn't make it so, you have to try a little harder than that. The original assertion was "If you care about privacy, don't use Android". A more nuanced and useful assertion would be this: If you don't trust a specific private company with your information, don't volunteer it to them. If you don't trust Apple/Google/Microsoft with all of your data, don't buy a device with a radio they have root access on and store all your data on it and carry it with you everywhere you go. This isn't Android-specific.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  Sophistry in the sense that according to any reasonable idea of privacy, meeting someone in public, so that they know where you are, your name and your face, is distinctly different from a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments. Imagine if it came out that a company had hired private investigators to follow you around, and collected a list of every location you visited. You tell someone else, and they say "if you really cared about privacy, you should not have come out in public, for instance I met you, and now I know your name, and that you visit this place". It is just nowhere near equivalent.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments Someone else commented that this has already been the case for ... at least a decade, for basically everyone (in the U.S.) – the cell phone carriers are those private companies. And there is substantial evidence that they're even less trustworthy than Google.
    - gatmne 9y ago
      So Google gets a free pass for collecting information the user explicitly opted not to provide because another company does it too? I hope you realize how flawed that line of logic is.
    - Brakenshire 9y ago
      Telecommunications companies are utilities whose use of this data is highly regulated. Google not only has locaton, it has contacts, browsing history, calendar, gmail, etc, and it has the legal right to combine this information together.
cube2222 9y ago
And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? I actually have location history in google maps turned on deliberately. You can't imagine how often it helped me to know where I was exactly, one and a half year ago, at a precise time. (That's how I managed to get a copy of my nexus 5x's warranty papers after it died on me) I don't really care about them collecting info about where I go, because it's actually useful for me. I probably would care if they were a small company with no record, but I do know that the worst Google can do is to target ads based on where I am. I deeply hate ads, I prefer to pay, and I actually often pay the "no-ads" premium if it's available, but if I do get ads, I prefer them to be as personalized as they can possibly be, because this way they are at least mildly useful sometimes.
- katastic 9y ago
  >And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? What's dangerous about them compiling your medical history? Who are you afraid of? Oh wait, that's a HIPAA violation. I wonder if they keep track of the location of every doctor's office you visit... and that abortion clinic... and that methadone clinic. Surely, nothing to lose there. The only information that isn't hackable, is information that's never gathered in the first place. The more valuable the information, the more likely someone will spend nation-state amounts of dollars to get it. I propose Donald Trump use the NSA (legally) to steal all of this information to track illegal immigrants who pass between Mexico and the USA border who don't have a passport on file. And then send SWAT officers to break into everyone's current location, throw them into vans, and send them back over to Mexico. Wow, that's really fucked up, huh? And Google made it possible.
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  - cube2222 9y ago
    I do think that people wanting to break into my medical history, could much easier just break into the system where my doctors hold my medical documentation, at least that's 100x easier than breaking into Google. The medical clinics have to check my ID anyways, so they have all the info about me. As for the second one: yes, if I'd be doing something inherently illegal, having a phone with Google on it could be kind of dangerous to me. As I'm not doing anything like that, I have no reason not to use it. Yes, with technology comes digitalization of information, and people can hack any of the places my information is, wherein Google is one of the most secure comparatively. You could argue that digitalization is bad, but before that, you could just find info on patients in the dumpster of the clinic.
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growse 9y ago

Claiming sophistry doesn't make it so, you have to try a little harder than that. The original assertion was "If you care about privacy, don't use Android". A more nuanced and useful assertion would be this: If you don't trust a specific private company with your information, don't volunteer it to them. If you don't trust Apple/Google/Microsoft with all of your data, don't buy a device with a radio they have root access on and store all your data on it and carry it with you everywhere you go. This isn't Android-specific.

Brakenshire 9y ago
Sophistry in the sense that according to any reasonable idea of privacy, meeting someone in public, so that they know where you are, your name and your face, is distinctly different from a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments. Imagine if it came out that a company had hired private investigators to follow you around, and collected a list of every location you visited. You tell someone else, and they say "if you really cared about privacy, you should not have come out in public, for instance I met you, and now I know your name, and that you visit this place". It is just nowhere near equivalent.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > a private company knowing exactly where you are at all moments Someone else commented that this has already been the case for ... at least a decade, for basically everyone (in the U.S.) – the cell phone carriers are those private companies. And there is substantial evidence that they're even less trustworthy than Google.
  - gatmne 9y ago
    So Google gets a free pass for collecting information the user explicitly opted not to provide because another company does it too? I hope you realize how flawed that line of logic is.
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    Telecommunications companies are utilities whose use of this data is highly regulated. Google not only has locaton, it has contacts, browsing history, calendar, gmail, etc, and it has the legal right to combine this information together.

cube2222 9y ago

And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? I actually have location history in google maps turned on deliberately. You can't imagine how often it helped me to know where I was exactly, one and a half year ago, at a precise time. (That's how I managed to get a copy of my nexus 5x's warranty papers after it died on me) I don't really care about them collecting info about where I go, because it's actually useful for me. I probably would care if they were a small company with no record, but I do know that the worst Google can do is to target ads based on where I am. I deeply hate ads, I prefer to pay, and I actually often pay the "no-ads" premium if it's available, but if I do get ads, I prefer them to be as personalized as they can possibly be, because this way they are at least mildly useful sometimes.

katastic 9y ago
>And? How does that matter? What's dangerous in them collecting my location information? What's dangerous about them compiling your medical history? Who are you afraid of? Oh wait, that's a HIPAA violation. I wonder if they keep track of the location of every doctor's office you visit... and that abortion clinic... and that methadone clinic. Surely, nothing to lose there. The only information that isn't hackable, is information that's never gathered in the first place. The more valuable the information, the more likely someone will spend nation-state amounts of dollars to get it. I propose Donald Trump use the NSA (legally) to steal all of this information to track illegal immigrants who pass between Mexico and the USA border who don't have a passport on file. And then send SWAT officers to break into everyone's current location, throw them into vans, and send them back over to Mexico. Wow, that's really fucked up, huh? And Google made it possible.
- deleted 9y ago
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- cube2222 9y ago
  I do think that people wanting to break into my medical history, could much easier just break into the system where my doctors hold my medical documentation, at least that's 100x easier than breaking into Google. The medical clinics have to check my ID anyways, so they have all the info about me. As for the second one: yes, if I'd be doing something inherently illegal, having a phone with Google on it could be kind of dangerous to me. As I'm not doing anything like that, I have no reason not to use it. Yes, with technology comes digitalization of information, and people can hack any of the places my information is, wherein Google is one of the most secure comparatively. You could argue that digitalization is bad, but before that, you could just find info on patients in the dumpster of the clinic.

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