Refusing service when the user does not consent to non-essential data sharing is illegal in the EU, and it also breaches Google Play's developer agreement. WiFi scanning is not essential to navigate with an app, and the least they could do to follow the law is to gracefully degrade the service if the user does not consent to share data about nearby devices, such as disabling traffic predictions.

Of course Google's lawyers will argue that this data is in fact required for navigation, the same way some banks in the EU now claim "legitimate interest" when they send you a message about their credit card promotions with winnable prizes, after you've explicitly opted out from all marketing communications.

> non-essential data sharing

But it is essential. Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS. In theory GPS has the accuracy, but remember you are in a big metal box filled with electrical wires. Not to mention other applications like isle specific navigation within stores, which is made possible by bluetooth beacons.

Heck, we are on the verge of a major world conflict where GPS accuracy may be degraded intentionally by the US or jammed by other forces.

Edit: Navigation is used in situations other than racing down the autobahn at 100 mph. Wifi triangulation is used when you are doing 20 mph on a busy street and need to be in the right lane to make a turn, or when you are walking down the street and need to know which unmarked door is the business you are looking for.

Here is some background on why GPS is shit in urban environments: https://vitalalert.com/markets/positioning-smart-cities/3d-p...

>But it is essential. Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS. In theory GPS has the accuracy, but remember you are in a big metal box filled with electrical wires. Not to mention other applications like isle specific navigation within stores, which is made possible by bluetooth beacons.

As someone who's degree had a course in sattelite rangefinding(both code and phase), this is bullshit. Code GPS measurement should be enough for that. Especially when you already contain road data to which you can snap, and probably have access to accelerometer too which can easily improve accuracy of 'snapping'.

You don't need to get precision down to a lane on the road for purpose of navigation, you just need to 'snap' to the right road. and warn user beforehand if they need to take a turn. Just like 'dumb' GPS navigation did prior to smartphone era, while having access to less satellite systems.

> As someone who's degree had a course in sattelite rangefinding

So you are well versed in multipath reflection and why it makes unassisted GPS in urban environments with tall buildings close together almost completely unusable?

> You don't need to get precision down to a lane on the road for purpose of navigation

If you want to build an early 2000s Garmin competitor, sure. But people don't buy $1,500 pocket computers every 18 months to keep doing the same thing.

>So you are well versed in multipath reflection and why it makes unassisted GPS in urban environments with tall buildings close together almost completely unusable?

Yes, a common problem even for static measurements. Yet it worked with 'dumb' gps navigations. Btw - it's not just a p roblem in urban evirorments, especially for phase measurements - you shouldn't do precise measurements near the trees.

Just to illustrate when doing a phase measurement, under good HDOP constellation, next to the forest we barely could achieve an accuracy of half meter using Leica 1200. We measured the same reference point using total station and neighboring network of reference points.

For a reference, you could easily get sub 2cm accuracy, although below 10cm was a minimum target for that job.

>If you want to build an early 2000s Garmin competitor, sure. But people don't buy $1,500 pocket computers every 18 months to keep doing the same thing.

Sure, but it isn't a CORE REQUIREMENT for the service to function. you can degrade it, and have it work pretty well, without requiring all users to submit other tracking data sources.

> Sure, but it isn't a CORE REQUIREMENT for the service to function.

Again, you don't know Maps product roadmap. Google is taking its "Next Billion Users" initiative very seriously internally. They might be looking at ways to offer navigation using only a Wifi/Bluetooth chip so they can make Android devices as cheaply as possible.

There is also the possibility that GPS may not be functional in areas Google wants to serve. The US Government blacked out GPS over multiple states during a test. China has satellites that can rip other countries satellites out of the sky. Russia intentionally crashed an old weather satellite into an Iridium satellite just as a weird flex.

The Google product roadmap has absolutely nothing to do with whether Google maps — which we concretely know can function without network assistance — should REQUIRE said network assistance for all users at present. Yah, the results may be better with network assurance, but it should still work with out it.

This sentiment also applies to your second point — if Google wants to get some kind of navigation working without using gps in some niche market categories, that’s fine. But that shouldn’t require me, with the gps module I paid for in my expensive smartphone, to share data with Google that I don’t want them to have and they don’t technically need.

And i as an user utterly do not care about their roadmap. I care about my experience.

That still does not excuse them for requiring access to those data sources, as they can still degrade service when user does not give consent. Also there are multiple networks at the moment(USA's GPS, Russia's GLONASS, China's COMPASS/BEIDOU(forgot which was geostationary system, and which one was global),and EU's Galileo), which makes total blackout of a single area unlikely.

And quite frankly, in case of total blackout we have a bigger problems than civilian GPS navigation.

Are you saying every tomtom, garmin, etc used Bluetooth and cell services for navigation all those years?

Not to be argumentative but dedicated GPS devices didn’t always have that option. Also I’m curious: it uses triangulation off cell towers to help. I don’t see how Bluetooth helps improve accuracy. Do they map WiFi spots accurately?

> Do they map WiFi spots accurately?

Yes, there are a number of companies that maintain BSSID->Lat/Long Databases. Skyhook is probably the biggest commercial one, and https://www.wigle.net/ the biggest open source one.

No, they used other technologies, such as DGPS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS

Not correct. Wifi is not used to boost precision at speed. That is generally done via dead reckoning using the gyroscope and accelerometer. Wifi helps with bootstrapping a coarse location quickly before satellites can be acquired, and with indoor positioning.

And (along with cellular data) with acquiring the almanac data via the Internet instead of waiting for up to 30 minutes for the satellites to broadcast it.

Last time I checked it took 12.5 minutes for full almanac broadcast... Did something change?

Yes, but only under optimal conditions.

Just by downloading recent data without any prior knowledge of your location (aside of maybe determining which continent you're on, which most of the time is already known because of which cellular network you're connected to), you can usually easily reduce that to around a minute with no WiFi, BT or cellular triangulation necessary - and that's on a cold start; hot start will be instantaneous anyway.

> But it is essential. Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS.

Assuming that's true (I'm skeptical), there's no reason why it can't gracefully degrade without the added information.

Regardless, I'm not sure what you mean by lane-specific navigation. Yes, I've seen Google put up a little drawing of the multiple lanes, with the correct lanes for the next turn in bright white, and the incorrect lanes in grey, but that doesn't need to know what lane you're currently in, as it just highlights which lanes are correct and incorrect, regardless of where you are.

Lane specific driving directions?

How many Wifi access points and Bluetooth beacons is Google expecting to find on the highway while moving at 70mph?

This may be Waze beacons which use bluetooth to help position the user when they're going through tunnels, where there is no GPS coverage.

https://support.google.com/waze/partners/answer/9416071?hl=e...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202359/waze-beacons-nyc...

...positioned to give you a 1-dimensional measurement: how far are you along this specific tunnel? Expecting triangulation is, well, overly optimistic. By an order of magnitude, at least (and would require a far denser mesh of beacons, whereas this only needs one beacon every $measure ; or two, for added redundancy).

In other words, it's still useful for navigation like "you are now 2000 meters/yards/cubits into the tunnel, therefore you should be taking either of the two middle lanes", but the trick is, this doesn't require the app to know your current lane.

How about in town, going 20mph?

Most of the android tracing that I've seen logged on location history is wifi multilateration based. Since wifi is on most of the time, it's the quickest way of finding your location (since you're most likely on the road), and you can turn off GPS saving about 25mW or more of power.

But it does mean you need WiFi on negating any power saving you make from disabling GPS anyway.

I would presume they're hoping to find the devices of other nearby users?

But those would be in random cars around you, which are constantly moving. How could those help retrieving your own location on a map?

If there is a car travelling the same direction as you but a bit to the right, then you are not in the rightmost lane.

How would the phone know the wifi signal is coming from your right?

Good point. Ok what about this then: Check the relative strength of cars travelling opposite way compared to same way.

I suppose if there are enough cars, and if you have access to the wifi and location data for enough of the phones, it might be possible to determine someone's relative location by triangulating the signal strength from multiple vantage points.

So my phone by itself doesn't know the direction of the signal, but two or more other phones could combine our location data with relative wifi signal strength and potentially get a better idea of where the signal is coming from. (I had forgotten that we were talking about an entity that potentially knows the data from all the devices, not just one endpoint.)

Maps routinely tells me to "use the right two lanes to exit", but it doesn't show any awareness of where I am. It says the same thing whether I'm in the left lane or the exit lanes. Are others getting directions like "merge two lanes to the right to exit"?

Similarly, I wish Maps would tell me the best lane to be in right now so that I have the minimum frustration with being in the proper lane for the next step.

Wifi and cell tower location are much less precise than GPS. They are irrelevant for lane detection.

Where they are useful is when you are indoors. Or when a tracking business wants an excuse to send your location to their servers.

Information about nearby devices is not essential for navigation, otherwise the permission wouldn't have been optional until now. It can improve the service in some situations, so the right way would be to explain the tradeoff and let the user control how much data is being shared.

Tinfoil hat: the number of US GPS satellites in operation has been going down, both in % of total satellites and in actual numbers over the years. I’d venture “US being able to rely on GPS” is probably not a great thing.

That being said, wanting more user data is probably the right answer.

> But it is essential. Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS. In theory GPS has the accuracy, but remember you are in a big metal box filled with electrical wires. Not to mention other applications like isle specific navigation within stores, which is made possible by bluetooth beacons.

Tell me exactly how this bluetooth beacons and WiFi APs will help you to determine the lanes? I did several research projects in this area and RF mapping by indoor beacons for navigating outdoors at vehicular speeds is very hard and unreliable. You don't want to get wrong bearing just because an WiFi AP has been moved to another spot. Nice in theory, BS in practice.

>But it is essential. Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS.

I'm trying very hard to not be sarcastic, but the past 10+ years it was not essential and served me great every time

If we're at the point someone is jamming GPS, I guarantee lane specific directions is going to be about the last thing I care about.

Are you suggesting that they have no choice but to completely stop locating the user as there's absolutely no way they could offer non-lane specific navigation? The vast majority of it would be identical and I'm sure they could easily and gracefully degrade to that when strictly necessary.

Google doesn't have lane data for every road in the world, yet clearly navigation is already implemented to work without it?

I don't know why people throw up random excuses for companies instead of accepting the simplest answer - they want as much data as they can.

Google was able to provide the service before, now they patched it out. So clearly it is not a question of ability to gracefully degrade but of willingness.

My 10 year old navigation device (WindowsCE-based) has no wifi nor celluar and lane specific navigation works fine. Also having lane specific navigation is not essential.

Could you share more information about your device? What is it?

Watch your step on that slipper slope

I don't have enough experience with the technical challenges of getting a good signal from a phone's tiny GPS antenna inside a vehicle, but that difficulty shouldn't give a company the right to violate privacy. If hardware is limited, make it better or make the limitation clear to the user and let them decide if they want to give extra data to allow a better experience.

We've had good enough navigation in mobile phones for years, why would they suddenly need to make this change now? And why can't I just keep the slightly worse experience if I prefer GPS-only location?

> But it is essential. description of feature non-essential to navigation

Sure. And stand-alone GPS navigation devices also don't work in cars.

> Heck, we are on the verge of a major world conflict where GPS accuracy may be degraded intentionally by the US or jammed by other forces.

During which (brief?) time we will have other pressing concerns beyond degraded mapping services. Why should this temporary condition that on its own is certainly not 'crippling' be an excuse for accepting that Google/Alphabet and like minded corporations want technical approaches that enable them to know everything about us 24/7?

This reason is complete nonsense. Google tells you that you need to be in the right lane for a turn regardless of which lane you are actually in.

Is nobody capable of looking out the window at the street signs that tell you which lane you need to be in to turn right?

Not really. That accuracy is not done with RSSI measurements from far away SSIDs.

WiFi triangulation is absolutely useless when determining which lane are you on. Your whole comment has been derived from false assumptions.

> Google (and Apple) maps provide lane specific navigation directions, which are really only possible with assisted GPS.

lol wtf. Source?

"But it is essential."

My box full of old TomToms and Garmins guffaws at this patently absurd claim.

This is google apologetic bs.

Can't believe I'm on this side of the debate, but at what point are we asking too much for free?

Google provide Maps for free to an incredible accuracy and value. Unlike Apple, the user is welcome to use any other app, and yet chooses to use Google Maps.

You could maybe argue that Google Maps is part of a package you bought the phone for, but realistically I think the solution is Google are just open about the use of data (which they are really) and offers a paid solution that doesn't track you.

Google is a large monopoly that subsidizes “free” products to burn a thousand mile clearing around their money engine.

If Google maps was not free, there would be more of a market for competing mapping products.

A mapping product has a natural intersection with advertisements - a non-negligible number of mapped trips are commercial in nature, and can thus catch consumers right before the moment of purchase. This might prove fertile ground for a new competitor.

So Google gives maps away, and anyone who wants to compete has to compete with free, and starts with a tremendous data disadvantage.

Through this lens, requiring you to disclose more data makes sense. They strengthen their data moat around the free product, which in turn protects their dominant position in ads.

I would like to see regulators crack down on this kind of anti-competitive behavior.

Makes me wonder, was the DoJ right that it was bad for Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer for free? I know it sounds insane now to have an OS without a browser, but was this the “original sin” that permanently warped expectations for what amounts people should be willing to pay for software?

Even today, outside of gaming/entertainment, the consumer software market is basically a wasteland. But if you had to pay for a browser today (pick your favorite), how much would that be worth to you? (Netscape cost $50! Or $90 in today’s equivalent.) I can’t think of any other market where we expect so much in exchange for paying so little.

Most likely today’s end state was inevitable; if MSFT hadn’t bundled IE, someone else would have made a similar play and capitalized on the network effects.

you could make similar arguments for any integrated or bundled technology. even products like microsoft office which knocked out competition back in the day when there were competing spreadsheet packages.

where it gets philosophically interesting is how this integration can cut across dimensions. software can be bundled horizontally, and software+hardware+commerce+service can be bundled vertically.

integration often leads to smoother experiences for end users at reduced cost, but comes at the expense of winner take all economics in the marketplace.

finding the right balance across both dimensions will be the great challenge for 21st century technology regulation. it's unclear to me how much antitrust experience from the past will help with this (or if consolidation may actually be desirable, freeing up capacity for new problems)

Thank you :-) I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I'm sad not seeing it reported more often.

I consider that Google Maps being free stagnated the maps market, and stopped any innovation from happening. Often when I say this, I get "But OpenStreetMap". When only volunteers can compete, that's a definite proof something's wrong.

(though arguably Google Maps did improve a bit over time, while gmail really didn't at all)

It's worth pointing out that OpenStreetMap has Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook and many other corporate contributors and they are contributing huge amounts of data, all the time, everywhere.

"Apple Maps, is by far the most prolific current corporate editor and was responsible for almost 80% of all edits to pre-existing roads in 2018."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/openstree... https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Jennings%20Anderson/diary...

Openstreetmap has never been volunteer only, but to be fair its only in the last decade that we've seen this change.

This bandwagon only happened because OSM gained traction, sometime in the 2010s. Sure, popularity breeds more popularity, afterwards. Even for all this, the biggest single event that boosted interest in OSM was, ironically, Google imposing far stricter gratis limits on its Maps, a few years back (2018, IIRC?)

I do btw, fully agree. If Google Search was forced to exist as an independent company it would radically affect (I believe for the better) the finance model of the rest of their products and help the market as a whole.

> Can't believe I'm on this side of the debate, but at what point are we asking too much for free?

You act like it's consumers moving the line. It's Google. Massively profitable for a long time now, Google. Your argument is that if we resist Google's ever-advancing march deeper into our privacy, that we consumers are the ones who are changing things, making things unfair to poor Google.

> at what point are we asking too much for free?

But isn't this reasoning sort of paradox? Google is asking for something here in exchange of allowing to use the navigation feature. That makes it by definition not free - it's just, there is no straight-forward monetary price to it.

You can redefine "free" as "any price other than money" - and lots of people in tech seem to do exactly that - but then, if done honestly, you'd have to allow people to reason about non-monetary prices in the same way as about monetary ones: Compare them, decide about fairness, etc.

What scares me is that frequently, this isn't done - on the contrary: A developer can make its users jump through all kinds of hoops and demand whatever they want - and all is ok because it's "free"!

> at what point are we asking too much for free?

I am a paying customer for a bunch of other Google products.

We’ve also seen with custom domain grandfathering out that they’re not out of options regarding their services terms.

They choose to make Maps free, and there is no option to pay for Maps outside of the API.

“Don’t complain it’s free.” is not a valid argument when it is a revenue making product from a for profit product company. It’s their choice, not ours.

"You could maybe argue that Google Maps is part of a package you bought the phone for"

Microsoft lost the case to be able to directly control the user's browser experience:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

They lost that case in 2001. I honestly doubt they'd lose it today.

Overturned at appeal and afterwards settled. So I wouldn't count it as a loss for Microsoft.

Google Maps doesn't make money using wifi data. It makes money the way it always does: through ads [0,1].

[0]: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7040605?hl=en

[1]: https://ads.google.com/hotels/

They can sell ads better if they know where you are. Wifi data is making that every easy and battery saving to track.

They already know where you are to a sufficiently high degree of precision with GPS. The battery matters to you, not to Google. Wifi ads next to nothing for Google.

Or more pedantically, Google knows where your device is to a sufficiently high degree of precision. They can't stop me from just leaving that shit home or in a faraday cage.

They also make a fair bit of money selling geofencing services to law enforcement agencies.

>Unlike Apple, the user is welcome to use any other app,

This part of your comment makes no sense to me - how do Apple users not have choice in maps apps...?

you can't set the default maps app in iOS. for example if you tap on an address in an iMessage you'll be directed to Apple maps

At the very least you can get asked which map app you want to use for sure, this is how my phone is set up.

That a service is offered for free *does not* mean that the service can request unnecessary privilege for its offering.

> at what point are we asking too much for free?

At the point that they should *STOP*, which is also free.

> Google are just open about the use of data

Will. Never. Happen. GLS is dystopian hellscape tracking masquerading under the fig leaf of "anonymity". Its technical details, pretty much a wet dream of the world's spy agencies, will never be revealed.

> and offers a paid solution that doesn't track you.

Really? Never heard of that. Can you elaborate?

At the point where Google's failures to release working, marketable, and financially successful projects are causing them to leech off freeware.

Remember openstreetmaps is also free. I fully support freeware being paywalled as that would decimate FAMANG's userbase.

If I ask Google Maps to provide my cycling directions, I get multiple options depending on destination. If I ask Apple Maps, I get an apology that directions are not available in my area. I don't think Googs is using openstreetmaps data

I don’t think Apple Maps use OSM correctly, otherwise they wouldn’t suggest me walking over a bridge that has been disused and partially disassembled a decade ago. OSMAnd doesn’t do that, for example.

Not been free for me, pre-installed on all the Android Phone I have bought, part of the purchased product.

They don't have to offer it for free. But I bet that if they stopped, someone else would.

If the business model Google themselves created will somehow fail if we don't continue to allow them to suck more and more private data out of us then so be it. They will have to change their business model. I am not interested in changing to accommodate them.

By the way, there is nothing free here. All of those advertising dollars come out of our pockets via increased products costs.

> Unlike Apple, the user is welcome to use any other app, and yet chooses to use Google Maps.

iPhones let you install Google Maps, you're not locked in to Apple Maps.

Fine, so give me a Google Maps subscription price that does not show me ads, does not save my location history. I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads, I would pay for a privacy-preserving and ad-free Google Maps. Maps and navigation is the only reason I have a smartphone. If they can't offer that, I'll buy a feature phone and a Garmin Drive or some other device for nav.

Genuine Question: Does paying for YouTube Premium prevent them from accessing your viewing data to better serve you ads elsewhere? I suspect it doesn't, but haven't really thought about it before

Yes you can use other mapping apps on iOS.

On the other hand, Google has often played hardball with manufacturers who wanted to include other location technology…

https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-l...

Is it asking to get it for free, or is it regulating how you can monetize it? I don't think the argument is that Google maps has to be free, it's that they can't make you pay for it with your personal data.

This encourages a classist system where the affluent get to keep their data private and the poor working class' data is open season for companies to exploit and use for oppressive purposes.

Please tell me this comment was written by some Google AI..

Here, how about a compromise.

They can have my data but they have to pay minimum wage for it.

I like that -- Guaranteed minimum income for anyone willing to sign up for big-tech free services. I think that is an experiment worth conducting.

What even does "minimum wage" mean in this context? Like, all the time they possess it? The CPU time they spend on it? I'm not sure I understand the sense this makes.

For this situation, it's easy, it's the entire time I'm driving.

They'd never go anywhere near the idea so I don't feel too much pressure to nail down how it would work for non-real-time data.

I read it as meaning (minimum wage * full time job), i.e. 40 hours per week.

Minimum price for something just makes it illegal to sell if it happens to be worth less.

If your data is worth that little, which it is, then yeah let's make it illegal for companies to coerce people into giving it up with boilerplate contracts. The impact is too high and the benefit too low.

This is not a slippery slope toward outlawing anything you could possibly sell.

I’ve been giving away "my data" for free stuff since the beginning of the Internet. Still waiting breathlessly for that high impact.

I’m guessing it’s more like being a frog in a stewpot as the temperature slowly rises.

Describe the boiling please.

Easy. The insidious infiltration of advertising and marketing in nearly every aspect of your life. Behind every purchase you make, there's money changing hands between the seller and the person who nudged your hand just a little bit to the left. You're not in control of where you spend your money. Don't notice it? That's the point.

Totally don’t mind it. Sure 99% of people don’t mind it either. I don’t see the actual damage done. Comparing it to "boiling the frog" is ridiculous.

But it surely was an awesome cause for politicians who took this non-issue and made a huge deal out of it. Actual damage done: my browsing UX destroyed and great free services I used every day now under jeopardy.

Congratulations on taking your personal choice and preference and imposing it on the great majority.

I got hit with this pop-up. It is a charade, despite the UI making it feel like a technical requirement.

And here is how I know it is a charade: voice navigation and the map itself both work perfectly in the background of this undismissable pop-up.

This is the most coerced I've felt in a long time and I can't help but feel that maybe iOS users don't feel this way.

>and it also breaches Google Play's developer agreement

Why do you think the Goog's apps are bound to the same terms as other developers? That agreement allows devs use Goog's services.

Of course, though giving yourself an advantage over competitors in a market you control is also illegal, so they should at least try to keep up the appearances.

> giving yourself an advantage over competitors in a market you control is also illegal

Is it? Doesn't seem to be a problem for Apple/Ios.

It arguably may allow the navigation to be more accurate, even if a tiny amount, though it obviously isn't strictly required since navigation works without the data.

>and the least they could do to follow the law is to gracefully degrade the service

They were already doing it and asking us to turn on camera to "better calibrate my location".

While I'm not sure if this change to Google Maps has been or will be widely rolled out, you may want to look into what GrapheneOS is working on with their Google Play compatibility layer [1]. It basically lets people use Google's services inside Android's standard app sandbox. That means they don't get access to privileged system APIs and can only access what the user chooses. It can also be used without a Google account.

GrapheneOS is working on a way to redirect the Play services location APIs to an open source implementation of those APIs which uses standard Android location APIs [2]. It's expected to be available in an upcoming release [3].

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

[2] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Loc...

[3] https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1486182874567122945

> to an open source implementation of those APIs

Is this MicroG? https://microg.org/

No, microG is a partial reimplementation of some of the functionality in the Google Mobile Services (GMS) app. Unfortunately, this approach has significant drawbacks. In order to install microG, your version of Android OS needs support for spoofing the cryptographic signatures of apps. Some OSes like LineageOS and CalyxOS allow this. See [1] for some pointers about why this is considered harmful. There was also a recent fairly serious infoleak bug in microG [2] that in my opinion was caused by its broad scope.

The way it works in GrapheneOS is that the OS redirects Binder connections (an IPC mechanism in Android) to a trusted, bundled app (GmsCompat) which will only implement the Play services location API in the foreseeable future. The rest of the Google Play functionality is implemented by GMS itself.

[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html#microg...

[2] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/1567

Speaking of signatures, google play now requires developers to submit the private keys we used to sign apps with. Without submitting a key I can't issue updates. Out of protest I stopped pushing updates to apps via Google Play.

Yes, that is fairly concerning. The last news I had about this was that using Google Play Signing (their key escrow and app signing service) was only mandatory for new apps as of August 2021. Not sure if that has changed recently. But everyone can see it coming a mile away, that Google will only continue tightening that grip.

To be honest, I understand the potentially good intentions behind Google's push to manage keys for app developers. It is not trivial to (1) keep private keys secure, and (2) not lose access to them over a long enough period of time. So Google can store them in HSMs in their datacenters and provide backups and access controls and such. But it also gives them the ability to deliver app updates with "extra stuff" for targeted individuals. See Figure 1 of [1]. That doesn't look very nice to me.

[1] https://developer.android.com/studio/publish/app-signing

The other reason is that they want to repackage your app for different target systems. Right now they are stripping assets and native libraries, but I hear they are going to start precompiling dex and shipping OAT directly in the APK.

I wonder if there's an internal fight between the Tools and Play teams, because all of this should be possible via the Gradle plugin, but understandably the Play team probably wouldn't see high adoption of APK splits if it required configuration via the morass of crap that is Gradle.

This can be solved in many different ways that don't require you to give them your keys.

It is pretty typical of Google to choose the most invasive solution.

That article may be overstating the danger somewhat, it will depend on the way the ROM chooses to implement it certainly but none of them give the permission automatically, some require you to enable it deep in the advanced app settings and some only enable it for system-level privileged apps (and if you can't trust those, then what can you trust?). See for instance LineageOS for MicroG's claims:

>The signature spoofing could be an unsafe feature only if the user blindly gives any permission to any app, as this permission can't be obtained automatically by the apps. Moreover, to further strengthen the security of our ROM, we modified the signature spoofing permission so that only system privileged apps can obtain it, and no security threat is posed to our users.

https://lineage.microg.org/#faq7

I wondered how long before google will have a reason for grapheneOS to suddenly stop being supoorted on the pixel. Now i know it will be soon and i get to tell everyone i told you so

They are creating custom silicon and a new operating system, wouldn't be surprised that will be the cutoff moment.

Google is moving all Android distributors to upstream Linux, so I guess it is us telling you so :).

Here we go again. Users desperately need an abstraction layer in Android that can spoof sensor data on a per-application basis. In this case, the spoofing layer could be set up such that whenever Google Maps uses the Android API to ask "Is wifi location sensing turned on" the spoofing layer would say "Yes." When GM asks "What wifi networks are around?" the spoofing layer would say "None." (Even better would be for it to just make up a bunch of random wifi SSIDs to pollute Google's wifi database with noise.)

I have several other apps (Twitter for example) who are able to tell that I have notifications for them turned off, and consequently they bug me to turn on notifications. I need a spoofing layer that tells Twitter "notifications are turned on" even when they're off, because if the app can tell some feature is turned off it will bug me or in some cases fail to work at all. So it's also critically important that there be no way for applications to figure out that the spoofing layer is in place.

Xprivacy basically did this. I supported the developer by buying the "pro" version and he promptly stopped maintaining it...and started a new project that was substantially more complicated/difficult to use, requiring writing blocking rules by hand...or paying him for the "pro" service that included 'recipes' for blocks.

Which users of the old app didn't get.

Fuck you, Marcel Bokhorst.

I do not know about this specific case and I have not used XPrivacy but I want to chime in here and say

Thank you, Marcel Bokhorst

Your NetGuard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard) and FairEmail (https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail) apps are great. They are high quality, open source and contain none of the dark patterns that mobile is plagued with. They are available to download from Github, F-Droid and the Playstore. There are paid premium features to support you but if I wanted to I could still compile the app myself to unlock them.

Wow, this seems like overly harsh feedback for stopping maintenance work on a project.

It's harsh, but not really about the maintenance being stopped, KennyBlanken paid for a pro version and the author changed commercial strategy and rebooted the project with a different approach, without granting a licence of the replacement to his existing customer. This is not respectful of paying customers.

Vendors stop giving system upgrades for their $1000 phones after 2 years and some people are complaining about their $2 one-time software license no longer working. What a sad world...

big yes to this.

whenever an app asks for a permission i want these options:

    allow
    deny
    pretend allow but send empty responses (like no wifi found)
    pretend allow but send fake responses

this was supported with Xprivacy many years ago and it was fantastic, but it stopped getting support. The entire pro-privacy android scene seems to have become a very small niche over the years

That's mainly googles fault. Xposed still lives on somewhat with the Riru project, but even a rooted phone without any mods will fail securitynet checks today, rendering it useless for most consumers that would have been willing to do the process before. With every android version things become less modular and less moddable, so the community shrinks as a consequence.

It's still possible to use XPrivacyLua (https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua) with passing SafetyNet. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but the community is still ahead.

You can achieve this with latest Magisk (v24+, https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk), enabled Zygisk and following modules:

- LSposed Zygisk (https://github.com/LSPosed/LSPosed, fork of Xposed)

- Universal SafetyNet Fix (https://github.com/kdrag0n/safetynet-fix)

- Shamiko [optional, more hiding but needs configuration] (https://github.com/LSPosed/LSPosed.github.io)

that's why this needs to be built directly into alternate roms, like graphene, /e/ or even lineage so this feature is available on those roms without the user needing to root their phone.

interesting. f-droid has an app called xprivacylua which seems to be a successor to xprivacy. last updated less than a year ago. the problem is that it requires rooting the phone which not many people will want to do, and the xposed framework comes with a big warning that it could prevent android from booting.

what we need is to have this integrated into the core OS so that it can safely be used by anyone.

Can someone explain this to me?

Have people just given up?

Yes, basically. After you root the device and install things like Xposed, "safety" feature called SafetyNet will most likely start reporting to apps that your device is untrusted. Google Pay, some banking apps and similar software may stop working or complain. There are still some ways to cloak the root and let SafetyNet pass but that may easily change with a simple Google Play Services OTA upgrade or something like that and it is simply not worth the risk for me personally. I don't want to spend days hacking around a recent update in order to regain the ability to pay with my phone, I don't want to block a queue of people when a payment machine displays generic rejection errors...

To be pedantic, if I just root a random device, but am very careful in terms of what I adjust... how does that fare?

Can't happen. Maps uses Google Location Services, which is built into Android and replaces the default, raw-sensor location provider for all applications. They have sunk their rootkit deep. You can't do this without uninstalling Google Play Services.

> I immediately installed Organic Maps, and I'm sure there are loads of others as an option.

Here are OSM-based maps applications for Android.[0,1]

Not all OSM-based Android apps listed on OpenStreetMap Wiki, so check out also maps apps in various F-Droid repos.[2]

Also here are maps apps for Symbian[3,4] and Maemo[5].

For other platforms there are also a lot of other apps.[6]

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android#OpenStreetMap_ap...

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_ap...

[2] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/

[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Symbian

[4] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/S60Maps

[5] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Maemo

[6] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software

Does anyone have a favorite that has worked well for them?

For hiking and biking, I like Windy Maps. It shows terrain contours and highlights foot and bike trail relations, and has an easy-to-use GPS track recorder. You can also ask for future weather forecasts along a navigation route, which is pretty keen if you're traveling long distances. Windy Maps does have a driving navigation mode, but I find that the extra map details that are handy for outdoors activities crowd the map too much for easy reference when driving, especially in dense areas.

For general map browsing, I tend to use Organic Maps. It does a better job rendering urban environments, and even shows primitive 3D buildings when OSM has the data. It's decent as a driving GPS.

Debatably, the best OSM-powered mobile app is OsmAnd, which is a more powerful application with the downsides that come with that -- slow, lots of settings, crowded UI. The killer features IMO are: 1) it's the only one (best I know) that allows users to zoom extremely close, which is vital to see all POIs in dense areas and also helpful to see details of parks and trails 2) it's the only one (best I know) that can interface with Android Auto enabled vehicles. (There's an iOS version of OsmAnd but I've never used it since it requires a subscription for map updates.)

There are particular use cases (eg hiking) when one of these OSM-powered apps will be an adequate or even superior replacement for Google Maps. These use cases are the exception. Google Maps has its own two killer features: 1) realtime traffic for car navigation 2) sophisticated public transit routing, again with realtime data integration.

All 3 of the above apps will attempt public transit routing, but I'd never use them. They don't comprehend train schedules, much less realtime data. They don't handle bus directions at all, though this might be down to the state of the OSM data in the locations I've tried them -- bus route relations are difficult to create and maintain in OSM, and easy to break.

I'm an OSM fanatic myself, so it's saddening not to be able to wholeheartedly endorse any of the current slate of apps. The good news is that the available apps have never been better and continue to improve. Sometime soonish it might be merely a minor inconvenience to de-google your mapping life. (Apple Maps is also pretty good with realtime traffic and public transit routing, if that's an option.)

If you are lucky to live in a city covered by them, Citymapper is a very good app for public transit routing.

I tried it in NYC... the map says "Google." If I'm going to be using Google anyway, why not just use the real thing? (This thread lists some possible reasons, obviously.)

I'm fairly sure they don't use Google at all for the transit routing which is their secret sauce. They just overlay their transit routing data over the top of plain Google Maps. Google is pretty horrible with certain routing. For example transferring to following train at a designated transfer station is something Google struggles with. There is a station in my home city designated as a transfer station with timed connections where Google maps will tell you not to transfer to a train 5 minutes later and actually suggests you wait 15/25/35mins for the following train) whereas other transit apps seem to handle this fine (e.g. it can infer that Train 1 is timed to stop at the station 5 minutes before Train 2 at the same station in order for people to transfer and therefore this transfer is suggested to the user as the most optimal route).

Organic Maps is the best FOSS mobile mapping solution at the moment as far as I can tell

https://organicmaps.app/

OsmAnd+ has worked great for us for several years.

I use OsmAnd~ 4.0.x[0], F-Droid packges of OsmAnd+, under Android 5.x for three years already for bike journeys.

Sadly, since OsmAnd+ 4.1.x it requires Android 6+ to work.

Looking inside changelog of OsmAnd+ I really can't understand why Android 5.x support was dropped.

Actually I can't decide where to move next after OsmAnd: Organic Maps[1], Pocket Maps[2] or something else.

Also from-time-to-time tested Navit[3], but its GUI is far away from what I'm looking for.

[0] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/net.osmand.plus?rep...

[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/app.organicmaps?rep...

[2] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.junjunguo.pocke...

[3] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.navitproject.na...

"Sadly, since OsmAnd+ 4.1.x it requires Android 6+ to work."

I mean, that's a pretty old version of Android.

> Looking inside changelog of OsmAnd+ I really can't understand why Android 5.x support was dropped

It might have something to do with the requirements for the Android Auto integration, which was just added recently.

Not in the list, Here maps (with ancient roots in Nokia Maps) is excellent.

Seconded, especially the HERE WeGo app just for route navigation is excellent and imho better than gmaps most of the time.

I don't know why, but I love Mapy.cz. Someone recommended it to me when I was hiking in eastern europe, and I use it daily for hiking and biking. I don't own a car but I occasionally also use it when I have rented or borrowed one and it works fine.

Osmand is the best. You can use offline maps, I highly recommend it.

Have been using it for six years now.

Search is good enough.

I don't know if there is an alternative.

Are you sure they're not doing this to get approximate location for use with A-GPS? Sure, GPS will work without it, but your time to first fix is going to be much longer, and your phone will have no idea where you are while you're waiting for that fix.

There's a good overview of A-GPS in module 5 here [1]. This is just how people expect GPS to work on modern mobile phones, to the point where they'd probably consider it a bug if they had to wait a while to get a fix.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CBINyC3NWU&list=PLGvhNIiu1u...

I think cold start times on modern GPS units are on the order of 30 seconds now. Even if you lose all almanac and ephemeris data, and don't know what time it is. AGPS is nice (2s cold start times), but by no means essential for a decent user experience.

(The datasheets are not a lie. I have had a ZED-F9P on the shelf for a month or so. Plugged it in and had a fix in 32 seconds. The delay was that I could only see 3 GPS satellites, so had to fall back to the slightly slower multi-constellation warm start.)

that most definitely is the reason to ask for wifi scanning, but the point was reiterated many times in the post. This is about privacy AND the fact that GPS-only navigation works globally just fine. If the user wishes to have that improved cold start approximate location then sure, turn on wifi scanning. If they do not wish to give that up, they should still be able to navigate

So if an app knows your exact lat long after 30s of spending battery power there's no privacy issue but if it uses wifi SSIDs around you to do the job in 2s with less power it's a breach of privacy?

Why not let the user decide what their personal privacy trade-off is?

That is, fundamentally, what the original post is about.

Because it adds to the software complexity. several boolean toggles for deciding what to incorporate into the localization algorithm: one toggle for GPS, another for wifi, Bluetooth, cell tower, barometer, etc. and fusing these in all the various combination, testing them, etc.

and after doing all that users will mess up their config and then complain that this app sucks not knowing someone on HN had this feature request for "privacy" reasons even though it's pretty unclear to me what privacy is being gained here.

Apple products generally don't give the user much choice and decide what's right for the UX and it's served them well

Though the software complexity was already there, and they decided to remove it (by adding another kind of software complexity), effectively deleting a feature that apparently people are using.

It cannot even be claimed to be an UX improvement since it's creating disruption for everybody that had this feature disabled.

At this point they should have added it to the terms of use and deleted the toggle directly (which I suspect they are going to do down the line, when they can prove that nobody keeps that toggle off).

Sorry, that argument doesn't hold water. The software has to work in the park with no wifi too.

you misunderstand completely. sending a complete list of SSIDs from your surrounding perfectly tied to an exact GPS location gets you a map of the world and precise-enough location based solely off of SSID data. They are having customers build their database to track you later when you use any G-app that has wifi access but not gps access, they would then know your approximate location while reading emails.

I thought AGPS was just the download of almanac/ephemeris data from a server on the internet. I didn't think it had anything to do with figuring out location using visible wifi APs or anything like that. Sure, you need an internet connection to download the AGPS data, but that could also be your cellular data connection and not wifi.

AGPS works with cellular, Wi-Fi is not required. So no, it’s not only for this reason.

As I understand it, the OP is trying to keep all non-GPS location sources disabled.

> I've had different things disabled. Wifi scanning. Bluetooth. Cell location data. Etc. Always with one single goal -- GPS only for location.

Not related to Google maps, but just today I got tired of the Amazon app sending me "you might like this deal" notifications and dug into whether it's possible to disable them.

You can, but if you do, Amazon will no longer send Amazon "Smile" micro-donations to whatever charity you've selected: https://i.imgur.com/wNAkUAT.jpeg .

I can't say that this is underhanded, but it does cast into sharp relief the fact that Amazon is a $1.5 trillion dollar company that generates upwards of $3B in yearly profit, and they're jerking you around, dangling the pennies they would otherwise send to a charity, unless you let them feed you product recommendations in OS notifications. (If you just disallow the entire Amazon app from sending notifications, as far as I can tell they still give the charity whatever 0.5% cut.)

So I have to choose between 1) allowing them to send me product recommendations, 2) a poor UX because I don't get any notifications at all, or 3) just not sending the charity any of the scraps of my Amazon transactions. I chose 3 and cut the charity a larger check than usual.

That's probably a violation of the App Store Review Guidelines; you're not allowed to withdraw app functionality unrelated to notifications if a user denies notification access; Apple has various language in various places that hints at 'you can't arbitrarily take away features to compel users to opt-in' being a core intent. If you're an Apple developer, and you're willing to stake that claim with Apple, you can report it while logged in to your developer account.

It’s not a violation if the CEO of Apple is on “having lunches together” terms with the CEO of Amazon.

I'm sure Apple will get right on enforcing that with Amazon.

You're talking about the Amazon app. Technically, the fact that you can add your credit card to pay for things violates the TOS. You never see anyone put up a fight against a giant.

Incorrect; Apple allows apps associated with purchases and rentals of physical objects to add credit cards to pay for things.

In one digital goods example, Kindle books are not “sold”, even though Amazon uses the word “Buy” in the button; if Amazon truly sold you a Kindle book, then they would be required to provide it to you upon terminating your account, as it is your possession in their care, and withholding it upon request would be grounds for a lawsuit. Under such a scenario, Amazon could successfully argue that Kindle purchase should be given the same rights as physical purchases, as they are truly purchases and not just “licenses”. Amazon has chosen not to pursue that scenario to date, as granting each of us full ownership of a copy of a digital good would compel Amazon to act in ways that are hostile to Amazon’s interests.

Shopping at Amazon has become such a blatantly user-hostile experience. More than any company I've dealt with in recent memory, they seem to tolerate just about any unethical behavior - allowing fake product reviews, facilitating sale of counterfeit merchandise, and evidently withholding charitable donations if you don't allow them to pester you via your own device.

It's to the point that shopping at Amazon feels dirty to me. Why support a company that's doing everything it can to transfer your well-being to Jeff Bezos?

Other online retailers (well, only the huge ones) seem to be stepping up their game and getting closer to Amazon's logistics and shipping ability.

It reminds me of how Netflix had more or less a monopoly on big-name video streaming for a ~decade but now every major rights holder seems to have either white-labeled somebody's tech or developed their own and are clawing back their IP to only show on their own platform[0].

Amazon had a long head start in online retail. It's true that they will probably never be surpassed in catalog depth ("the everything store") but I don't delve into the long tail of that depth very much and I'll be happy to move my retail spending elsewhere.

... well, now that I think on it, my only payment method on Amazon is my Amazon Visa, which gives me something like 5% cash back / equates to a 5% discount on everything I buy from Amazon. So any competitor is going to have that headwind to fight against as well.

[0] I wonder if this was a Netflix misstep: could they have prevented this by giving a greater share of the subscription revenue to the groups they licensed content from?

Amazon has also become a dumpster for poor quality products and high prices now a days here in Canada. Few months ago, I bought some bedsheets which claimed to be Egyptian cotton but upon delivery, that wasn't true. I have had this experience with other products too now on Amazon.

Their customer service and returns are still very good but the product quality and online marketing is filled with lies.

In my experience they've always required me to go to a UPS store or retail location (Kohl's, Whole Foods, etc.) to process a return, even when it's a counterfeit product.

Returns I've elected are a great process; being forced to run errands for a $trillion+ company because they've deceived you about the bedsheets they are selling is something else entirely.

There's a point to be made about how it's not possible for Amazon to check every single listing (made by other companies) for authenticity, nor they can use user feedback as a way to check/block those companies as many people use a different return reason than the real one (eg. "I don't like it" becomes "it's counterfeit").

It's unfortunate but you'll have to learn how to navigate the new amazon, and possibly use the mentality that everything CAN be counterfeit on this platform.

I think this is definitely true - and it's enough that I just don't find it worthwhile to use the service anymore. The overhead of doing detective work to determine whether something might be counterfeit, and the too-commonly-realized risk that I'll need to re-pack something and schlep it to UPS makes it utterly not worthwhile.

One will basically never encounter this problem with, e.g., Target, Best Buy, NewEgg, Ikea, Bed, Bath, & Beyond, or other retailers - what makes Amazon preferable to any of those brands, when the diligence you described is required to shop there and not elsewhere?

And yet sometimes I'm basically forced into using them. Twice in recent months an item bought from a retailer is 20-40% cheaper if I buy it from that same retailer but through their amazon account. It infuriates me. I'm trying to avoid amazon as much as possible, but if you charge 20-40% more for the same item when ordered direct from you vs your amazon storefront, I'll give amazon my business every time. I wish retailers would stope doing this. One item was fire starters and the other was a barbell.

Clearly that seller is getting some benefit for selling the product through Amazon, probably close to 20-40% of the value of their product if they didn't. They aren't just using Amazon because it's fun. It provides them some value.

> I'm trying to avoid amazon as much as possible, but if you charge 20-40% more for the same item when ordered direct from you vs your amazon storefront, I'll give amazon my business every time. I wish retailers would stope doing this.

Unless you change "I'll give amazon my business every time" to "I won't accept it" it will continue. It's basic economics in a competitive environment with a lot of buyers and sellers. To you, the cost of the Amazon experience is worth the financial benefit. There are likely other consumers that the Amazon experience is not worth it who buy it from the manufacturer. And likely, on the other side, there are those would use the Amazon experience for a mere 5-10% discount instead of the 20-40%. Those people receive a "consumer surplus" for getting it at 20-40% below value instead of 5-10%. The market has settled at 20-40%.

Big picture, if you don't like it in a competitive environment, buy from the manufacturer and help shift the supply demand curve.

> Clearly that seller is getting some benefit for selling the product through Amazon, probably close to 20-40% of the value of their product if they didn't.

Or the small pool of people who refuse to use amazon are willing to pay 40% extra out of principle, and the seller is happy to exploit this behaviour while it lasts.

Somewhat of an aside, I'm pretty sure at least one of the items was on amazon at that price in error. The manufacturer/retailer charged a large shipping cost (40lbs) when ordered through their website while on amazon the shipping was free. The item still shipped from the seller (not Amazon and not prime), so I saw it as likely either an oversight or an error because what I paid could hardly cover the shipping costs of such an item.

On iOS, such marketing notifications is supposed to be against the developer guidelines but I regularly see Uber, Ubereats and other high profile companies break those rules without any repercussions.

Even Apple has broken that guideline[1]. They have since changed the rule and those are now allowed if the user agrees[2].

For Uber, disable those in Settings > Privacy > Notifications > Discounts and News.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/18/18229492/apple-music-push...

[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/04/apple-now-allows-push-notific...

Ah didn’t know Apple changed the guidelines.

Is uninstalling the app and using the website in a browser an option? This is what I prefer to do.

Yes.

Why not just set aside some money yourself and donate to a charity of your choosing without tying it to how you spend your money on Amazon? Making your donations directly will help you better see how your money will be used. For example, Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS) tells you basically how contributions are used when you donate to them:

https://www.gems-girls.org/donate-now

Maybe he does both. I certainly do. I choose to use Smile because I can give 0.5% of my Amazon purchases to my chosen charity with no extra charge to myself. I also give a regular monthly donation; I know that the smile donations help them a lot.

I don't have the Amazon app though; I just use the website.

Amazon is setting aside some money that people are paying them specifically to donate to charity if people choose. The donations are coming from your charges

I recently uninstalled Lyft for a similar reason. It wouldn’t stop sending me marketing push notifications, which couldn’t be disabled in the app. Since notifications are pretty integral to the core function of Lyft, I couldn’t turn them all off. So I uninstalled the app.

Why not just donate the money directly to charity and not have Amazon notifications?

With Amazon Smile's charity thing, the money donated is not from my pocket. I am pretty happy with the idea of being able to give some of Amazon's money to EFF.

Simply don't use the Amazon App, and there are no notifications.

Where does Amazon get the money from?

From Amazon's pocket. It's probably some sort of a tax scheme, though.

If it makes you feel any better, it's a publicly traded company. Legally, everything it does must generate shareholder value.

Smile is really just a way to get additional value from donations large companies have to make anyway for lobbying and tax purposes.

They would've happened anyway, but you get to direct it. Maybe they can sell the data it generates to identify areas or people more likely to donate to charity, and sell that data to fund raising companies.

And maybe (new use case!) they can use it to reduce opt-outs of notifications, which carry associated value.

I can envision the notification product owner reaching out to the smile team with this new opportunity. "Hey, you have this cool feature, I really think it could help here!"

>Legally, everything it does must generate shareholder value.

What's the basis for this claim?

None.

Since I am determined to crush this stupid meme, here is a longish thread discussing the relevant case law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674

The gist of it is that management must act in the best interests of the company generally, but has exceptional latitude in deciding what those are: you don’t need to squeeze every penny from customers if there’s some nebulous but plausible reason why doing so may eventually be good for the company and its shareholders. Dodge is a tough case because Ford explicitly disavowed any business reason for his actions, but instead framed it as his own philanthropic interest and not, say, a reinvestment in the company or an attempt to grow the customer base.

The Supreme Court has ruled in opposition to this perspective [1]:

“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Typo in the URL, should be: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

From TFA:

> A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes...

That doesn't exactly support the position that everything a publicly traded company does must generate shareholder value. The judgement reads closer to, "You can't run your publicly-traded company like a charity."

Yes, I knew that when I posted this the reply was coming. I'm not parent commenter so I won't defend _everything_ part. But it is clear that decisions must be made with the intent to benefit shareholders (or as you pointed out, at least not intentionally as charity (unless that could be construed as benefiting shareholders)).

It's clear there is a lot of ambiguity involved. I believe this is covered in the wikipedia article but I haven't read the full thing in a long time.

Thanks for answering! I don't feel like arguing with the funny armchair lawyers leaked from Reddit who have never heard of fiduciary duty.

I'm an armchair lawyer too, and, yes, it's a bit more nuanced, but not really meaningfully so. If a board member found out about Smile, they'd be legally obligated to put reasonable efforts into ensuring it's in the best interest of the company.

Might not apply in all jurisdictions or corporate structures (probably most, but happy to learn where it doesn't!), applies to companies not shareholders (sometimes different), and I am still not a lawyer.

Would love to find out where I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell from what the citations of other non-lawyer "I did my own research" posts, it's not going to happen here.

That is not corporate law 101. I see how a layman could construe it that way, particularly when motivated to argue.

However, it is perfectly fine for corporations to allow you to disable notifications without charging you for it.

The general thrust of that value does not mean the corporation has to find a way to profit from every interaction

If you have an iPhone and haven't been using Apple Maps, it's basically on par now with Google Maps for navigation. I hadn't tried Apple Maps for years because of how bad it used to be, and was pleasantly surprised to find the maps are incredibly accurate and turn by turn navigation is rock solid. I haven't touched Google Maps in months, and this post is reminding me that it's time to just uninstall it

Are you in the US? I've found it pretty ropey in Europe every time I try to ween myself off Google maps.

Another benefit of Apple maps is that it gets preferential treatment from the os in that it appears on the lock screen when navigating (I really wish this api was open to third parties). This is nice for navigation on foot.

I am in the US, yes

Apple Maps has better integration with my 2020 Subaru so I switched. It has some features that are more advanced than google, like the voice telling what to do next or advance rather than just immediately before.

It’s still rather bad about explorative searching for businesses/restaurants and getting accurate hours, so sometimes I’ll find a place using google maps and then put it into Apple Maps.

>It’s still rather bad about explorative searching for businesses/restaurants

That it just pipes Yelp results infuriates me every time I deal with it, as I refuse to sign up for Yelp.

So did I! My 2019 Subaru’s OS crashed so many times on Android auto was the reason I switched to iPhone at all.

It is amazing how long it takes to recover from a rough product roll-out, isn't it?

Truth

iPhones are strictly worse for what OP is complaining about. You cannot get your location at all in any app without enabling WiFi scanning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21708157

OP's solution of installing another Android maps app is probably the best available option that fits OP's privacy requirements.

When did this change? Last time I had an iOS device it was definitely possible to use GPS without WiFi. If this is a recent regression that is disappointing.

How so?

That only turns off using WiFi for data. If you have location services enabled, which is necessary to get ypur location on iOS, iOS will continue scanning WiFi networks and uploading them to Apple.

What I found is that google maps EXCELS in redirecting past traffic jams and what have you, when driving (cross Europe) and really no other navigation available to me (iPhone) does that even remotely as reliable.

EDIT: Meaning I am able to keep my wheels rolling and do not end up in traffic jams.

Why not Waze then? It's where google buys traffic data anyway. You also get police / speedcam etc locations and reporting.

Waze is owned by Google.

Apple maps has still been total crap for me outside the US.

Apple Maps is quite good here in New Zealand. I have an Android device and my husband has an iOS device. I have been impressed several times with Apple being able to route to places Google Maps can't. Apple seems to be better at adding new roads etc compared to Google here in New Zealand.

Maybe someone should build a portable (FCC compliant?) device to put in your car that spoofs and rotates a bunch of 2.4/5Ghz SSIDs periodically to "trick" apps that mine wifi data with GPS location. Bonus points for bogus names like "Starbucks Wifi" or "McDonalds Free Wifi" in the middle of the highway.

Even easier, just reverse engineer the API and send the SSIDs yourself.

A rapsberry pi, a drop dead simple shell script[1], and airbase[0] will get you this in 15 minutes:

[0] https://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=airbase-ng

[1] quickliest and dirtiest:

  #!/bin/bash

  while read line; do
    echo "creating basestation ${line}"
    airbase-ng -c 9 -e "${line}" -W 1 wlan0 &
  done < <(echo -e "ap_name_1\nap_name_2\nyet_more_ap")

You should also randomize the BSSID.

I used to ride a train which had onboard wifi. Whenever I was on the train and underground, Google Maps would decide that I was at the terminal station of the train - which I assume is where it first scanned that SSID - and would try to reroute me.

I had this problem for a few years back in the mid-10s - any time it saw something like "Virgin WIFI", my phone would assume I was in Manchester, even if I was in London / anywhere Virgin trains go, leading to huge jumps in location[1].

[1] which annoys me - a smartphone should be able to figure out that I have not just travelled 200 miles in 2 seconds and filter that out. This is still a (smaller) problem - my current phone often thinks I've jumped 5 miles for a minute and then back.

> Bonus points for bogus names like "Starbucks Wifi" or "McDonalds Free Wifi" in the middle of the highway.

Is the goal to make Google Maps publish a Starbucks/McDonalds in the middle of the highway? I can't imagine they would use the SSID as a source for building location.

No, the SSIDs are used to assist the GPS on where the user is located. Likewise, the data is used to triangulate a user in a specific business/location without needing access to GPS (some more nefarious uses: user is connected to "Joe's Psychiatry Wifi" every Wednesday, maybe we could group the user as a depressed adult for advertisers).

> user is connected to "Joe's Psychiatry Wifi" every Wednesday, maybe we could group the user as a depressed adult for advertisers

If you can think of any kind of nefarious use for data, you can safely bet that Zuckerberg has already done it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160830031017/http://fusion.net...

> No, the SSIDs are used to assist the GPS on where the user is located.

and vice versa, GPS is used to assist on where the SSIDs are located.

> Bonus points for bogus names like "Starbucks Wifi" or "McDonalds Free Wifi" in the middle of the highway.

I find no joy in saying it, but I bet that would get you some unwelcome attention - trademark infringement, defamation, tortious interference - from one of those companies. :(

>I find no joy in saying it, but I bet that would get you some unwelcome attention - trademark infringement, defamation, tortious interference - from one of those companies. :(

While that's a wonderfully dystopian view, I'd expect that wouldn't happen unless you attempted to use such SSIDs in a commercial context.

for your "wager" to be successful, I should expect to be sued over saying stuff like "Old McDonald had a quarter pounder Henway" or "Starbuck made the same inferior coffee for Ahab every day."

I'll await cease and desist letters from McDonald's and Starbucks.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office[0]:

   Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of 
   a trademark or service mark on or in connection 
   with goods and/or services in a manner that is 
   likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake 
   about the source of the goods and/or services.

Not sure how using a WiFi SSID or other statement that includes trademarked terms (especially those that have cultural roots separate from the trademarks) could be an infringement unless the source is actually selling or marketing a competing product.

[0] https://www.uspto.gov/page/about-trademark-infringement

What part of "likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services" isn't clear to you? McDonalds and Starbucks both provide wi-fi as an enticement for their customers not as a public service. Confusing people as to the origin of the "McDonalds WiFi" SSID pretty clearly fits within that definition. Then there's the "tortious interference" angle, and the fact that they don't have to win any kind of suit to make your life miserable. If you sell a product that uses their trademark to degrade the value of a service they provide, that's more than enough for them to get you into court.

Do you like making lawyers (on both sides) rich? Or tying up courts so they can't hear cases with more merit? Because even if you win, those are the outcomes. Vexatious litigation is a real thing, and practically impossible to prosecute. It can happen to you. The real world doesn't care about your notions of abstract justice, and it's not dystopian to recognize that. If anything, it's your utopian view that's "wonderful" (i.e. appealing but unrealistic) here.

>What part of "likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services" isn't clear to you? McDonalds and Starbucks both provide wi-fi as an enticement for their customers not as a public service.

That's a ridiculous statement on its face.

I didn't realize that I could receive my hamburger or cup of coffee via WiFi.

Certainly, if I surreptitiously set up a WiFi network next to an establishment providing WiFi with an SSID that purports to be from that establishment, there's definitely a problem.

But trademark infringement probably isn't even in the top five in the list of problematic issues.

But GP wasn't even suggesting something like that. Rather, he was suggesting using such SSIDs in unlikely places, in a likely futile gesture, to confound Google's douchebaggery.

As such, I wholeheartedly disagree with you.

Not about frivolous lawsuits, they are a pox on society.

Rather, I disagree that a poor choice of WiFi SSIDs in the context of GPs example (creating such SSIDs in one's moving car to confound Google) could result in a lawsuit from the likes of Starbuck's or McDonald's.

I'd go even further and say that doing so from a stationary site (e.g., one's home), even if that site is in relatively close proximity to such a retail establishment, isn't very likely either.

In fact, a cursory search[0] doesn't show any trademark litigation associated with using SSIDs. The first result is, in fact, your post, with no other relevant results.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=SSID+trademark+infringement

Edit: Fixed typo.

Is there a law regarding which names you can't use for hotspots/APs?

Even if there is, I doubt anyone will go after that unless the "attacker" involves some serious crime with that combined.

Attacking innocent people with rogue SSIDs would be definitely wrong, but if done only to trick Google it would be a fun experiment - and they deserve it (maybe not for this particular change but as a company in general).

It doesn't have to be a case they can win to be extremely troublesome for you (though they probably could win if their trademark is embedded in your code). Unless you can afford to make your own lawyers rich, it's a bit unwise to go "I dare you" to large US companies. Better to ship something less incriminating, and leave the spicier suggestions for anonymous comments on web forums.

Hm. If it's in your car, yeah.

Though if I put a thing like that in my window, you'd have to rummage through 20 - 50 flats to find the source of that SSID to identify the creator. With zero legal reason to search my flat over my neighbours flat and vice versa. And also, there is no actual interruption of radio services, so there is no reason to bring in more precise measuring equipment. And I might even have enough time to toss that pi off of the balcony if all else fails.

Just another idea popped. What if your code doesn't include any bitstream that contains "Starbucks" but has some ML driven mechanism of passively listening to Wifis around the city, noting them and using those names dynamically? Since Starbucks McDonalds etc would (probably) be the highest quantity of signals found your code will be mimicking those names without having a single bit in the code.

What would be the legality of that (as long as the intention is not to attack the public)?

And while you are at it, store the BSSID along with the SSIDs seen to make it practically indistinguishable from the real thing.

IANAL (maybe one will weigh in) but that sounds a lot safer to me.

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever been sued over their SSID?