Privacy

32109 readers

609 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Google Just Killed Warrants That Give Police Access To Location Data (www.forbes.com)

submitted 11 months ago by dantheclamman@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] hersh 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Google's blog (linked in the article) offers more info on the changes. https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-history-and-new-controls-coming-soon-to-maps/

The key points are that Google Maps location history will be stored on-device, with an option to back it up (encrypted) to the cloud so if you switch devices you can keep the history. The default auto-delete will be three months, and you can increase or disable that limit.

I guess that means location history will no longer be accessible via the web site.

I don't think Google has implemented any E2EE system for backups before (correct me if I'm wrong). I wonder how exactly this will work.

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yes, this seems designed to target the broad "who was in this area" warrants. Must have been a big enough headache for them that they came up with this new system. For me, I keep this location on indefinitely. Has been handy for me in a couple situations: I'm a scientist and helped me reconstruct my field work locations when I lost some field notes, and it helped me contact trace when I caught covid!

[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago

arstechnica has a pretty good writeup about this.

As with all things Google the only way to win is to not play.