3 ms·

Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.") may well apply here. It could just be a bug.

alserio 5y ago
Sure. But the actor gains something valuable from this, so it would be a very convenient bug.
buran77 5y ago
Google has been explicitly conditioning access to some features on users agreeing to share data [0]. This is perfectly in line with that strategy. Bugs which happen to work out that way aren't bugs. [0] https://bgr.com/tech/google-maps-forces-you-to-share-location-data-but-its-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds/ https://bgr.com/tech/google-maps-forces-you-to-share-locatio...
- jevoten 5y ago
  That article reads like a corporate press release, and is full of misleading statements and outright lies, from the very first sentence: If you use Google Maps to get around, you probably know that Google has to access your location information. That’s the only way that it can offer turn-by-turn navigation and direction features. Plenty of map apps can calculate a route offline and offer navigation, without any data leaving the device. But Google and other companies want to keep people ignorant of how much can be done offline, so they have an excuse to spy on us.
jevoten 5y ago
Google has proven so many times they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, bringing up Hanlon's razor is a bad joke at this point. Unfortunately I can't find the story of that Mozilla developer that recounted how many times Google introduced "bugs" that only harmed Firefox, and how long it took them to realize this was malicious due to applying Hanlon's razor. The fact is, if your opponent is even moderately intelligent, Hanlon's razor guarantees to keep you blind to their intentions.
0x002A 5y ago
I think this time Occam's razor works just fine ;-)

3 ms·

Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.") may well apply here. It could just be a bug.

by onion2k 5y ago

alserio 5y ago
Sure. But the actor gains something valuable from this, so it would be a very convenient bug.
buran77 5y ago
Google has been explicitly conditioning access to some features on users agreeing to share data [0]. This is perfectly in line with that strategy. Bugs which happen to work out that way aren't bugs. [0] https://bgr.com/tech/google-maps-forces-you-to-share-location-data-but-its-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds/ https://bgr.com/tech/google-maps-forces-you-to-share-locatio...
- jevoten 5y ago
  That article reads like a corporate press release, and is full of misleading statements and outright lies, from the very first sentence: If you use Google Maps to get around, you probably know that Google has to access your location information. That’s the only way that it can offer turn-by-turn navigation and direction features. Plenty of map apps can calculate a route offline and offer navigation, without any data leaving the device. But Google and other companies want to keep people ignorant of how much can be done offline, so they have an excuse to spy on us.
jevoten 5y ago
Google has proven so many times they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, bringing up Hanlon's razor is a bad joke at this point. Unfortunately I can't find the story of that Mozilla developer that recounted how many times Google introduced "bugs" that only harmed Firefox, and how long it took them to realize this was malicious due to applying Hanlon's razor. The fact is, if your opponent is even moderately intelligent, Hanlon's razor guarantees to keep you blind to their intentions.
0x002A 5y ago
I think this time Occam's razor works just fine ;-)