The main issue isn’t that someone would be interested in you personally but that data mining may put you in categories you don’t want to be in. 99.9% correlation of your „likes“ and follows to those of terror suspects - whoops you’re a terror suspect yourself. You follow heavy metal bands and Harley Davidson? Whoops, you have a 98% likelihood of drinking and smoking, up goes your insurance rate. And so on.
u/Mayayana
Indeed. But most people here seem to have misunderstood your post. One of my favorite examples is from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, whoo said in an interview (on youtube) that if you think you have something to hide then maybe you shouldn't be doing what you're doing. (Like maybe the Jews on Kristallnacht shouldn't have been living in their houses?) Schmidt was later reported to have got an apartment in NYC without a doorman, to avoid gossip about his promiscuous lifestyle. :)
u/SandboxedCapybara
I always thought the like "no bathroom door," "no curtains," or "no free speech" arguments always fell flat when talking about privacy. Sure, as people who already care about privacy they make sense, but for people who don't they are just such hollow arguments. I think a better argument is real life issues that people always face. The fact that things like their home address, social security number, face, email, phone number, passwords, their emails and texts, etc could be out there for anyone to see soon or may already be is almost always more concerning for people.
People trust companies. People don't trust people.
Speaking of privacy and tracking, would anyone know of a location app that can be trusted not to sell the tracking data? My family uses Life360 so that we can track our children's locations as they commute to and from school.or.run around the neighborhood, that sort.of thing. We have Android phones. I'm under the impression that if we all had iPhones we could track them using Apple apps,.which would not do anything funky with the data. This is something I wasn't too worried about until reading more about privacy, but I still need to know where my kids are.
I told a friend who works in tech that we use Life360 and he blanched. He began to persuade me it would not be a good thing to use. Thanks to a post here I now turned on location tracking in Google Maps in our phones. I've been hearing that we should try to limit our use of Google but in this instance is it better than Life360? Are there any other alternatives for Android?
Did you check out Locus? It's an end-to-end encrypted location sharing utility designed for decentralized servers running Nostr. It's free and open source software that secures that your location will most likely never be shared with entities out of your control.
Yes, you can set a timer when you want Locus to share the location (every Monday and Tuesday from 8-20 for example, but you can set it to 24/7 if you input the times right).
There's two ways to share with Google maps - time based and just for a trip. My wife and I use both, the trip share gives an ETA for when you will arrive and it's great for when one person gets take out and the other preps dishes, sets the table.
BTW no one “sells” that type of data because it’s the access to it that they want. They will sell access to you via ads, but they won't give over the data. They will let someone pay for ads to be targeted to people that went to X location.
This is what google do. The person suggesting google maps is literally telling you to use the biggest ad company in the world’s product if you want privacy lol.
Plenty of services that access location information sell “deidentified” datasets with that information all the time. Which are readily and routinely reidentified.