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Just because the feature isn't valuable for your personal use case doesn't mean it isn't valuable. I share my location several times a week. It's especially use

Just because the feature isn't valuable for your personal use case doesn't mean it isn't valuable. I share my location several times a week. It's especially useful in areas where street addresses don't follow a logical order (or are nonexistent altogether). I want to be able to share my location with Google so that they can share it with one of my contacts. I then want Google to discard that information. I don't want them to share it with other parties unless I consent specifically to each instance. My consent should be informed (a lot of problems would be solved if we just held businesses to higher standards in terms of disclosing their business practices). I'm even OK with certain exceptions that are consistent with principles that Western civilization is built on. For example if Google retains that information for a period of time solely for the purpose of complying with a lawful search by the police, for which a warrant was obtained based on a reasonable and specific suspicion, I'm OK with that. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

pacala 8y ago
When $746 billion of market capitalization critically depend on Google carefully recording your location information every second in the day and using it to increase advertisement revenue, it is somewhat naive to expect the Google will comply with common ethical sense out of the good of their hearts. On the flip side, if communication with your contacts is encrypted end to end [possibly with law enforcement agencies with a warrant having access to decryption keys], then no matter how much monetary incentive Google has to violate your privacy, they can't. How about we build systems that keep creepy stalkers at bay by design? What happened with "can-do" attitude in the hacker-sphere?
- esrauch 8y ago
  Can-do attitude includes making things that were otherwise annoying frictionless and easy through technology. The feature being discussed here is literally the ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact. With the new Android permission model you can even block the app from reading your permissions when not using it.
  - pacala 8y ago
    A. The ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact B. The ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact without man-in-the-middle snooping. All I'm saying is that B is better than A, for me personally and for our society at large.
  - pacala 8y ago
    [In depth answer] I dug up the RCS5.1 spec [0]. RCS location is not a benign feature where a user is sharing its location every once in a while by pressing a button. RCS location appears to be continuously broadcasted on unsecured channels, open to third party middle men, for example Google, Verizon or three letter agencies. Note the last bullet point, "Geolocation". Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, and this is not yet another veiled attempt at commercial surveillance. Please educate me. From Section 3.7, Social Presence Information: === In the EAB, the contact information is extended with social presence information and foresees the following attributes: * Availability, indicates the user’s (un)willingness to communicate, [snip] * Geolocation, depicts the user location [snip] Once User A has accepted User B as an RCS authorized contact, User B will be able to see the geolocation information of User A (displayed with a text or a map, or both of them) and all updates of that information. === [0] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/RCS-5.1-V2.0-UNI.pdf https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
    - esrauch 8y ago
      The section you have listed is about "you have set a geolocation already, control access to who can see it". Frankly there is no way that Google's RCS app streams your location to any endpoint without an explicit opt in in the app. I'll eat my hat if I'm wrong.
      - pacala 8y ago
        User selects to share location with 1 person in the world, and maybe even forgets about it because the feature is such low value [for the user] anyways. Google [and Verizon, and whomever else is in the middle] gets to snoop on user location forever at whatever precision they want, because "it's in the spec". Looks like a dark pattern for tricking everybody to share the location with Google, enabling corporate 24/7 mass surveillance. Shameful. Google has many choices: don't implement clear-text geolocation presence, don't implement RCS, speak up in the standards committee, communicate the implication to Google users, etc. Google chose to silently use a dark pattern to enable 24/7 location snooping. Shameful.

pacala 8y ago

When $746 billion of market capitalization critically depend on Google carefully recording your location information every second in the day and using it to increase advertisement revenue, it is somewhat naive to expect the Google will comply with common ethical sense out of the good of their hearts. On the flip side, if communication with your contacts is encrypted end to end [possibly with law enforcement agencies with a warrant having access to decryption keys], then no matter how much monetary incentive Google has to violate your privacy, they can't. How about we build systems that keep creepy stalkers at bay by design? What happened with "can-do" attitude in the hacker-sphere?

esrauch 8y ago
Can-do attitude includes making things that were otherwise annoying frictionless and easy through technology. The feature being discussed here is literally the ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact. With the new Android permission model you can even block the app from reading your permissions when not using it.
- pacala 8y ago
  A. The ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact B. The ability to manually press a button to send your location to your contact without man-in-the-middle snooping. All I'm saying is that B is better than A, for me personally and for our society at large.
- pacala 8y ago
  [In depth answer] I dug up the RCS5.1 spec [0]. RCS location is not a benign feature where a user is sharing its location every once in a while by pressing a button. RCS location appears to be continuously broadcasted on unsecured channels, open to third party middle men, for example Google, Verizon or three letter agencies. Note the last bullet point, "Geolocation". Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, and this is not yet another veiled attempt at commercial surveillance. Please educate me. From Section 3.7, Social Presence Information: === In the EAB, the contact information is extended with social presence information and foresees the following attributes: * Availability, indicates the user’s (un)willingness to communicate, [snip] * Geolocation, depicts the user location [snip] Once User A has accepted User B as an RCS authorized contact, User B will be able to see the geolocation information of User A (displayed with a text or a map, or both of them) and all updates of that information. === [0] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/RCS-5.1-V2.0-UNI.pdf https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
  - esrauch 8y ago
    The section you have listed is about "you have set a geolocation already, control access to who can see it". Frankly there is no way that Google's RCS app streams your location to any endpoint without an explicit opt in in the app. I'll eat my hat if I'm wrong.
    - pacala 8y ago
      User selects to share location with 1 person in the world, and maybe even forgets about it because the feature is such low value [for the user] anyways. Google [and Verizon, and whomever else is in the middle] gets to snoop on user location forever at whatever precision they want, because "it's in the spec". Looks like a dark pattern for tricking everybody to share the location with Google, enabling corporate 24/7 mass surveillance. Shameful. Google has many choices: don't implement clear-text geolocation presence, don't implement RCS, speak up in the standards committee, communicate the implication to Google users, etc. Google chose to silently use a dark pattern to enable 24/7 location snooping. Shameful.