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There's no way this is what this is about, no? This seems totally fine, whereas the article makes it seem like they were actively tracking your location while t

by gman83 6y ago

There's no way this is what this is about, no? This seems totally fine, whereas the article makes it seem like they were actively tracking your location while telling you they weren't. If this is it then I disagree completely with the ruling.

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".
shadowgovt 6y ago
Did some digging. Details are a little fuzzy, but I think I see why the Australian courts had a problem with this. Here's one blog post that expands on the topic from a couple years back: https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracked-a-spotlight-on-google-maps-and-android-location-tracking/ https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracke... Google isn't just making an educated guess about where you are based on what you searched for... It's making an educated guess based upon what its servers are allowed to know about your query. It's unclear to me whether all the data Google collates is published anywhere public, but this includes things like originating IP address and headers sent in the request that can be inferred to be locale-relevant. For example, looking at my own search history, Google's real certain it knows when I'm doing queries from "home" (perhaps because I told it my home location in Maps and it's correlated requests from a specific IP address with that location, perhaps because Google's fabric is huge and it can disambiguate origin of request based on where the request enters the network, perhaps because I registered Google appliances at "home" that are on the same network). Key idea is: none of those are technically "Ask the device for its GPS state and cache it," so none of them are controlled by disabling Location History. If the Court is arguing "you can't claim you aren't tracking location by making 'location' a technical term and then combining several other pieces of state to estimate someone's geographic point of origin for a web request," I can see that argument.

by gman83 6y ago

_underfl0w_ 6y ago

The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".

shadowgovt 6y ago

Did some digging. Details are a little fuzzy, but I think I see why the Australian courts had a problem with this. Here's one blog post that expands on the topic from a couple years back: https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracked-a-spotlight-on-google-maps-and-android-location-tracking/ https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/blog/the-right-to-not-be-tracke... Google isn't just making an educated guess about where you are based on what you searched for... It's making an educated guess based upon what its servers are allowed to know about your query. It's unclear to me whether all the data Google collates is published anywhere public, but this includes things like originating IP address and headers sent in the request that can be inferred to be locale-relevant. For example, looking at my own search history, Google's real certain it knows when I'm doing queries from "home" (perhaps because I told it my home location in Maps and it's correlated requests from a specific IP address with that location, perhaps because Google's fabric is huge and it can disambiguate origin of request based on where the request enters the network, perhaps because I registered Google appliances at "home" that are on the same network). Key idea is: none of those are technically "Ask the device for its GPS state and cache it," so none of them are controlled by disabling Location History. If the Court is arguing "you can't claim you aren't tracking location by making 'location' a technical term and then combining several other pieces of state to estimate someone's geographic point of origin for a web request," I can see that argument.