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From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location d

From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo" That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.

tucnak 6mo ago
Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.
- idle_zealot 6mo ago
  From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
  - oldcigarette 6mo ago
    No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
    - convolvatron 6mo ago
      they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.
      - oldcigarette 6mo ago
        I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof). See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-what-strong-privacy-law-looks https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff. Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.
  - Cider9986 6mo ago
    >they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them. I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.
    - observationist 6mo ago
      This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation. The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data. Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value. The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
  - gruez 6mo ago
    >Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users. I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
    - Forgeties79 6mo ago
      “Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.
    - vel0city 6mo ago
      I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways. The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision. Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
      - brookst 6mo ago
        Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives. I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.
- 59percentmore 6mo ago
  They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit. For instance, in 2018: > Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374/ https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
  - beambot 6mo ago
    To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
    - cataphract 6mo ago
      They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
    - GeekyBear 6mo ago
      Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official. They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy. To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
  Nobody is going to be worried about how you never litter if you're constantly kicking puppies and biting babies on the nose.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago
  People are to busy labeling them and the rest of tech as Far Right to care.
binkHN 6mo ago
Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.
dataflow 6mo ago
I think the trigger was this: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-history-abortion-clinic https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-hist...
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  Correct. Google moved to finally address this after the press started focusing on how hording location data could put women who visited reproductive healthcare clinics in legal jeopardy. > Privacy advocates fear Google will be used to prosecute abortion seekers https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-abortion-prosecutions https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-aborti...
Nemo_bis 6mo ago
Google got caught in the aftermath of the Carpenter vs. US ruling. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence-warrants-says-most-location-data-will-be-stored-locally/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence... By stopping that one specific way they supported warrantless surveillance, Google probably managed to make the current round of litigation moot so that Google won't suffer a negative ruling on the merits. They can start all over again in a slightly different way once the attention goes down a bit.
- alephaseffa 6mo ago
  [dead]
xyzzyz 6mo ago
I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me. Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
- shadowgovt 6mo ago
  The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place. To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
  - traderj0e 6mo ago
    The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech
    - shadowgovt 6mo ago
      Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does. The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society. Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere. Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.
ece 6mo ago
Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. There's a reasonable case telcos might also need the data for network purposes, but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS. It's safe to say everyone else is basically collecting data for serving ads even if they say otherwise. The opposite of dragnet surveillance, which is what flock and geofencing warrants are: data aggregated and shared without the consent of the user, is data collection minimization even when done for security or apps.
- belthesar 6mo ago
  > but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.
  - kingleopold 6mo ago
    with 6G we as humans in everywhere will be able to achieve surveillance that was impossible to think decades ago! Incredible
- mrktf 6mo ago
  > but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS My knowledge in this topic is not deep, but cell precision should be pretty accurate, because modern cell tower areas are much smaller, then to have well tuned beamformer it need to have relative precise angles between antennas and know signal travel time (distance). I think it should achieve something 30 or 15 meter precision (doing assumption that distance is accurate in 50/100ns order)
- JadeNB 6mo ago
  > Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking. (Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)
baranul 6mo ago
Google has proven to not be a company to trust about privacy. It's their business model, along with selling data. A few good will public relations moves is likely nothing compared to the unseen dirt and deals they are doing.
- yieldcrv 6mo ago
  Google is a largely autonomous machine, advancement within Google requires people to do visibly disruptive projects and prove initiative, and the next person that wants to advance may look to the same project to undo it Leadership has their own separate causes that may form your view of what Google’s business model is, but more importantly its at the expense of ignoring the rest of Google and no interest in steering it because they are in the same system A machine

tucnak 6mo ago

Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.

idle_zealot 6mo ago
From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
- oldcigarette 6mo ago
  No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
  - convolvatron 6mo ago
    they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.
    - oldcigarette 6mo ago
      I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof). See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-what-strong-privacy-law-looks https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff. Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.
- Cider9986 6mo ago
  >they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them. I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.
  - observationist 6mo ago
    This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation. The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data. Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value. The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.
bigyabai 6mo ago
FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
- gruez 6mo ago
  >Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users. I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    “Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.
  - vel0city 6mo ago
    I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways. The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision. Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
    - brookst 6mo ago
      Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives. I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.
59percentmore 6mo ago
They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
GeekyBear 6mo ago
If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit. For instance, in 2018: > Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374/ https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
- beambot 6mo ago
  To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
  - cataphract 6mo ago
    They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
  - GeekyBear 6mo ago
    Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official. They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy. To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.
b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
Nobody is going to be worried about how you never litter if you're constantly kicking puppies and biting babies on the nose.
Gagarin1917 6mo ago
People are to busy labeling them and the rest of tech as Far Right to care.

binkHN 6mo ago

Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.

dataflow 6mo ago

I think the trigger was this: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-history-abortion-clinic https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-hist...

GeekyBear 6mo ago
Correct. Google moved to finally address this after the press started focusing on how hording location data could put women who visited reproductive healthcare clinics in legal jeopardy. > Privacy advocates fear Google will be used to prosecute abortion seekers https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-abortion-prosecutions https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-aborti...

Nemo_bis 6mo ago

Google got caught in the aftermath of the Carpenter vs. US ruling. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence-warrants-says-most-location-data-will-be-stored-locally/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence... By stopping that one specific way they supported warrantless surveillance, Google probably managed to make the current round of litigation moot so that Google won't suffer a negative ruling on the merits. They can start all over again in a slightly different way once the attention goes down a bit.

alephaseffa 6mo ago
[dead]

xyzzyz 6mo ago

I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me. Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

shadowgovt 6mo ago
The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place. To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech
  - shadowgovt 6mo ago
    Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does. The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society. Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere. Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.

ece 6mo ago

Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. There's a reasonable case telcos might also need the data for network purposes, but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS. It's safe to say everyone else is basically collecting data for serving ads even if they say otherwise. The opposite of dragnet surveillance, which is what flock and geofencing warrants are: data aggregated and shared without the consent of the user, is data collection minimization even when done for security or apps.

belthesar 6mo ago
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.
- kingleopold 6mo ago
  with 6G we as humans in everywhere will be able to achieve surveillance that was impossible to think decades ago! Incredible
mrktf 6mo ago
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS My knowledge in this topic is not deep, but cell precision should be pretty accurate, because modern cell tower areas are much smaller, then to have well tuned beamformer it need to have relative precise angles between antennas and know signal travel time (distance). I think it should achieve something 30 or 15 meter precision (doing assumption that distance is accurate in 50/100ns order)
JadeNB 6mo ago
> Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking. (Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)

baranul 6mo ago

Google has proven to not be a company to trust about privacy. It's their business model, along with selling data. A few good will public relations moves is likely nothing compared to the unseen dirt and deals they are doing.

yieldcrv 6mo ago
Google is a largely autonomous machine, advancement within Google requires people to do visibly disruptive projects and prove initiative, and the next person that wants to advance may look to the same project to undo it Leadership has their own separate causes that may form your view of what Google’s business model is, but more importantly its at the expense of ignoring the rest of Google and no interest in steering it because they are in the same system A machine