4 ms·

There's ideal and there's reality. Do you deserve to get robbed and assaulted if you walk down a dark alleyway alone at night? No. But it's something you can a

There's ideal and there's reality. Do you deserve to get robbed and assaulted if you walk down a dark alleyway alone at night? No. But it's something you can avoid if you think ahead. There are people who will call this "victim blaming" but they are living in a land of magical thinking, not reality. Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider and apps to know where you are going.

throwaway92394 4y ago
> Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider and apps to know where you are going. Not to put words in their mouth but I think Kergonath's point is- * Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider to know where you are going. * Turn off your location services (and likely use a vpn, etc) if you don't want apps to know where you are going. Yes apps _can_ still figure this out if they're trying that hard. I don't think this is in most people's threat model. If we want to go down that road then I'll point out there's ALPR's that track cars, and people who track bluetooth mac addresses your car likely has. Keeping your phone off until necessary is not realistic for most people. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley. Exactly. And yes, it depends on your threat model and how much you personally value your privacy. If someone wants to avoid leaving any footprint, more power to them. This should not prevent other people from enjoying better baseline privacy. We can have both: decent privacy by default, and possibly much better if you want to.
kergonath 4y ago
Sure, and lock your door when you leave home, that’s common sense. But it is not a reason to argue against outlawing burglary. I am not against taking precautions, though no precautions are foolproof and I have been mugged on a bus in bright daylight. But I am against this edgy cynical idea that there is no point deciding rules because someone will circumvent them. Or that you are a naive idealist if you want better. Instead, what we do is we punish burglary, and it becomes rarer and rarer, and everyone lives better, even if one day you happen to forget to lock your door. Same thing for PII, and personal data in general. We should punish companies that are reckless with their data, and strictly limit the information access providers can log. This is not magical thinking, and is completely uncontroversial for medical or financial information. So why the phone cynicism (not from you, but from a large number of technophiles who ought to know better)?

throwaway92394 4y ago

> Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider and apps to know where you are going. Not to put words in their mouth but I think Kergonath's point is- * Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider to know where you are going. * Turn off your location services (and likely use a vpn, etc) if you don't want apps to know where you are going. Yes apps _can_ still figure this out if they're trying that hard. I don't think this is in most people's threat model. If we want to go down that road then I'll point out there's ALPR's that track cars, and people who track bluetooth mac addresses your car likely has. Keeping your phone off until necessary is not realistic for most people. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley.

kergonath 4y ago
> What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley. Exactly. And yes, it depends on your threat model and how much you personally value your privacy. If someone wants to avoid leaving any footprint, more power to them. This should not prevent other people from enjoying better baseline privacy. We can have both: decent privacy by default, and possibly much better if you want to.

kergonath 4y ago

Sure, and lock your door when you leave home, that’s common sense. But it is not a reason to argue against outlawing burglary. I am not against taking precautions, though no precautions are foolproof and I have been mugged on a bus in bright daylight. But I am against this edgy cynical idea that there is no point deciding rules because someone will circumvent them. Or that you are a naive idealist if you want better. Instead, what we do is we punish burglary, and it becomes rarer and rarer, and everyone lives better, even if one day you happen to forget to lock your door. Same thing for PII, and personal data in general. We should punish companies that are reckless with their data, and strictly limit the information access providers can log. This is not magical thinking, and is completely uncontroversial for medical or financial information. So why the phone cynicism (not from you, but from a large number of technophiles who ought to know better)?