4 ms·

> A lot of businesses depend... Do I care? Like not to be glib but as an end user buying a phone for my personal uses, I dont care about their businesses and

by Teever 2y ago

> A lot of businesses depend... Do I care? Like not to be glib but as an end user buying a phone for my personal uses, I dont care about their businesses and I loathe the idea that their business model requires such an anti feature to be widely deployed in personal devices such as smart phones. Tell you what. I have a business model that requires your personal location data. Be a dear and send it to me. And again, why do I care about caller ID. It's been trash for years. I just never answer calls and use diffetent platforms such as Signal to communicate with my friends. It may open the door to so many frauds, but it opens the door to so many more abuses. People will talk about these 'features' differently the first time a large genocidal action takes place that makes use of this data.

mindslight 2y ago
I fully agree with where you're coming from, but you kind of veered off with that last sentence. In general I think the threats from fine-grained surveillance databases are a lot more nuanced and pernicious than genocide.
newaccount74 2y ago
Ride hailing apps rely on the fact that both customers and drivers phones don't lie about their location. Mapping companies rely on the fact that their crowdsourced data is reliable. Emergency services rely on the fact that phones share accurate locations. Delivery companies require authentic location data from their agents. Apps that allow people to rent scooters or bicycles rely on non-fake location data. If you made it easy to provide fake location data, a lot of apps would suddenly have to deal with a whole new class of fraud. I just don't see how this would be a net beneficial change.
- nayuki 2y ago
  > Apps that allow people to rent scooters or bicycles rely on non-fake location data. There's a way to fix this. Each bicycle can store a private key, and your phone needs to talk to the bike nearby to do a live challenge-response before you can rent it out.
  - NotPractical 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure they already do that. As always, the standard network security advice is "don't trust the client", and yeah, it'd be nice to be able to trust the client, but it would also mean the total abandonment of any meaningful user control over their own devices, so it's not worth it IMO.
- codebje 2y ago
  You can separate all of those examples into one of two categories: one in which the owner of the phone has a vested interest in providing accurate location and an easy means to enforce consequences for undesired behaviour (I want my ride to find me, I want emergency services to help me, I want to find a bike near me), and another in which a company hopes to use someone else's information for free for their own benefit: delivery companies with a "bring your own phone" policy, or crowdsourcing companies hoovering up free data to build their value. Since I paid for my phone, I really don't see why it's incumbent on me to help the latter case out. A delivery company is free to supply a managed device or fit a device to their trucks. A crowdsourcing company should in any case already be assuming all client data is suspect and ensuring it's properly correlated with other sources of information. There's no fraud here. The worst case outcome in your list is perhaps a delivery agent just having their phone say they've done a particular route when they just sat in the movie theatre or whatever, but the fact that none of their packages got delivered is enough to out them even if the shipping company is trying to get location data for free from a device the shipping company doesn't even own. If I hire a bike I'm nowhere near I still pay for it. Denial of service attacks in which the perpetrator is fully responsible for the cost of resources consumed just aren't a thing that happens. The only group involved in these scenarios that's taking adverse action against another party for their own gain is the entitled companies demanding users' phones be locked down so they can continue to get material gain from them without compensation. The net benefit here is that these companies' profits should definitely be taking a back seat to users' rights.
  - newaccount74 2y ago
    I think you are stuck in an "us vs. them" mindset. It's not all consumers vs corporations. Consumers actually want to use services offered by companies, and willingly accept what you consider drawbacks. We want accurate traffic data in maps, and crowd-sourced key finders, and all the other conveniences afforded by unspoofable location data, and we give up a little bit of control in exchange for that. Companies don't compensate us with money for crowdsourced data; they compensate us by offering services they couldn't offer otherwise.
    - 2y ago

by Teever 2y ago

mindslight 2y ago

I fully agree with where you're coming from, but you kind of veered off with that last sentence. In general I think the threats from fine-grained surveillance databases are a lot more nuanced and pernicious than genocide.

newaccount74 2y ago

Ride hailing apps rely on the fact that both customers and drivers phones don't lie about their location. Mapping companies rely on the fact that their crowdsourced data is reliable. Emergency services rely on the fact that phones share accurate locations. Delivery companies require authentic location data from their agents. Apps that allow people to rent scooters or bicycles rely on non-fake location data. If you made it easy to provide fake location data, a lot of apps would suddenly have to deal with a whole new class of fraud. I just don't see how this would be a net beneficial change.

nayuki 2y ago
> Apps that allow people to rent scooters or bicycles rely on non-fake location data. There's a way to fix this. Each bicycle can store a private key, and your phone needs to talk to the bike nearby to do a live challenge-response before you can rent it out.
- NotPractical 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure they already do that. As always, the standard network security advice is "don't trust the client", and yeah, it'd be nice to be able to trust the client, but it would also mean the total abandonment of any meaningful user control over their own devices, so it's not worth it IMO.
codebje 2y ago
You can separate all of those examples into one of two categories: one in which the owner of the phone has a vested interest in providing accurate location and an easy means to enforce consequences for undesired behaviour (I want my ride to find me, I want emergency services to help me, I want to find a bike near me), and another in which a company hopes to use someone else's information for free for their own benefit: delivery companies with a "bring your own phone" policy, or crowdsourcing companies hoovering up free data to build their value. Since I paid for my phone, I really don't see why it's incumbent on me to help the latter case out. A delivery company is free to supply a managed device or fit a device to their trucks. A crowdsourcing company should in any case already be assuming all client data is suspect and ensuring it's properly correlated with other sources of information. There's no fraud here. The worst case outcome in your list is perhaps a delivery agent just having their phone say they've done a particular route when they just sat in the movie theatre or whatever, but the fact that none of their packages got delivered is enough to out them even if the shipping company is trying to get location data for free from a device the shipping company doesn't even own. If I hire a bike I'm nowhere near I still pay for it. Denial of service attacks in which the perpetrator is fully responsible for the cost of resources consumed just aren't a thing that happens. The only group involved in these scenarios that's taking adverse action against another party for their own gain is the entitled companies demanding users' phones be locked down so they can continue to get material gain from them without compensation. The net benefit here is that these companies' profits should definitely be taking a back seat to users' rights.
- newaccount74 2y ago
  I think you are stuck in an "us vs. them" mindset. It's not all consumers vs corporations. Consumers actually want to use services offered by companies, and willingly accept what you consider drawbacks. We want accurate traffic data in maps, and crowd-sourced key finders, and all the other conveniences afforded by unspoofable location data, and we give up a little bit of control in exchange for that. Companies don't compensate us with money for crowdsourced data; they compensate us by offering services they couldn't offer otherwise.
  - 2y ago