Well that's an odd and inflammatory headline to use for the issue
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Not really. Google is making this change so they have no way to share incidental bystanders location data when its requested/demanded by law enforcement. Google is the only tech company cooperating with police to provide this type of "geofence/general area" location data.
The change comes three months after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found police across the US were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases, and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime.
Google will change its app so that it can no longer tell law enforcement its users location data, inline with more privacy focused companies like Apple and their maps app. This change comes after years of advocacy from digital rights groups, but appears to be mainly motivated by negative press coverage.
The headline is specifically about what the article is about.
Wow, surprising that for once Apple is the good guy here. There's a good reason this is a bad idea, and it's not reallt hard to see why. Circumstantial evidence isn't evidence of an actual crime for a reason.
Apple has been pushing digital privacy as a selling point for a while, and actually living up to it a bit.
pushing digital privacy as a selling point and living up to it doesn't add up when you do compromise privacy behind closed doors
- Apple and Google are both guilty of this. Frankly, however, neither of them are particularly “guilty”, as
- Both Apple and Google were legally obligated not do disclose this practice until recently. It was revealed by Apple as soon as this embargo was lifted.
I’m not sure what more they could have done in that situation. Did you expect them to break the (very fucked up) law just to alert the public? Can Signal no longer claim to be privacy-focused if the government forces them to log a suspect’s password?
That is even worse, they knew they were compromising privacy and still boasts about being privacy centric. It's like Saudi Arabia claiming to be a utopia while actively using modern slavery in the background.
Apple and Google are both guilty of this. Frankly, however, neither of them are particularly “guilty”,
Google doesn't claim to be a herald of digital privacy, nor its users claim Google is a saint.
Apple users every time any criticism comes up
Other companies do it too…
Ya no shit, we know other companies are bad, however, keeping Apple at the pedestal no matter what is annoyingly cringe.
The only argument I’ve ever heard is that Apple has comparatively better privacy practices than most companies we interact with. I frankly don’t think that argument is particularly unreasonable.