4 ms·
Strange question. Why on Earth would a privacy service want to "interact well" with Google location tracking in the first place? It's a bit like asking if you
by piaste 3y ago
Strange question. Why on Earth would a privacy service want to "interact well" with Google location tracking in the first place?
It's a bit like asking if you can install Cortana on Trisquel GNU/Linux.
- threeseed 3y agoBecause if I am searching for a review of cafe or want to know where a movie is showing I would prefer it to be in the same continent as me. I am not expecting it to know my exact GPS location but would be nice if it could at least bring state or country level tailored search results.
- adr1an 3y agoYou may add 'near Cityname, Countryname' to your query ;)
- jwmcq 3y agoIt's never even occurred to me not to do this. I wonder if that's just because I grew up on the internet before geolocation methods were widespread/good.
- piaste 3y agoI just checked, and there's an optional country selection box you can use. But for local results, I'd just prepend $cityname to your search query. Faster, unless you live in Llanduwhatsthattowninwales.
- samizdis 3y agoAh, that would probably be Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
- zorrolovsky 3y agoHumorous question: Could moving there be a privacy advantage? I can imagine insanely long locations break a good bunch of databases and CRMs, specially legacy ones... I would give my location to every spammer and scammer and refuse to spell it. "Oh yeah... I'm super interested in your product. But you gotta ship it to Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. Is that ok?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taumatawhakatangi%C2%ADhangakoauauotamatea%C2%ADturipukakapikimaunga%C2%ADhoronukupokaiwhen%C2%ADuakitanatahu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taumatawhakatangi%C2%ADhangako...
- stavros 3y agoThis is the xkcd with the 1III1II1 plates, it's "oh, that Welsh town with the long name".
- marginalia_nu 3y agoUser profiling is a huge reason why Google works as well as it does. Location data is just one part of that, but a pretty big one. If you remove that, it's as bad (or worse) than most of its competition.
- rcoveson 3y agoUser profiling is a huge reason why Google works the way that it does. I remember a time when my wife was trying to look up a fix for Mass Effect on a 21:9 monitor. Terms like "ultrawide mass effect" and such. Google would not stop returning Blizzard help pages on how to configure the resolution for Heroes of the Storm, another game that she played. Not a single page related to the actual search terms. The more we poked at it the more I couldn't believe it. Bing, of course, just did the dumb, obvious, correct thing and returned a bunch of web pages containing the search terms, which were helpful. Google seems to do this infuriating thing where it reduces search terms to basic "synonyms" (which are often more general than the original word, e.g. "Mass Effect" becomes "Video Game") and then injects personal search history related to the synonym (which is how Heroes of the Storm ends up as part of the query). Most of the time it's just subtly enraging; you know the page you're looking for exists, and you know your search is extremely precise, but Google keeps giving you overly-generalized results with a skew towards your "profile". Anyway, all that is to say that I feel exactly the opposite of what you feel about the relationship between this Google "feature" and the quality of its results.