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That's because you haven't been the victim of fabricated narratives supported by your tracked locations as data in order to imprison or blackmail you. This is just a rehashed "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about".

Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".




I didn't say nothing to worry about I said that, on balance, location tracking probably helps law abiding citizens more than it hurts them. It's an economic choice.

I am far less likely to initiate a serious crime in Canada than I am to be falsely accused of a serious crime. It is hard to fake exhaust data and saying "I saw him near the John St Starbucks at 9am with a gun" is fakeable just by following someone around. You don't need my Google data to prove it. It's on the CCTV cameras, it's on the cellphone towers my phone is pinging, etc.

I understand this makes people nervous, and I agree that there is something to be nervous about, but when I talk about the practical choice of recording your location data to a provider like Google I don't see much practical downside at the present time.


That's really making the assumption that this didn't happen before data tracking.....

And that argument is much, much older than the digital age. If anything, extra tracking helps exonerate more than without it (false imprisonment, etc) https://time.com/wrongly-convicted/


I don't see how historicity weakens the argument.

The reality is that data can be used to your benefit or against you. Having more of it doesn't shift the balance one way or another. It just means there's more opportunities to take it one way or the other.

Your times article also makes no mention of location tracking raising exoneration rates. It talks most prominently about how cheap faulty field drug tests contributed significantly to the improper convictions.


If you're innocent, more information about what happened is more likely to exonerate you than incriminate you. If you're guilty, the extra data is more likely to incriminate you.


Every extra data point is an opportunity for abuse, not exoneration.

When you are facing wrongful conviction, the assumption is that you are unable to present evidence in an effective manner anyway.


Thoughts on logging your own location with free software instead of Google doing it?


I'm assuming you mean local logging of your location, as opposed to burying it in a company's blackbox of a cloud. I think it's a far superior option from a privacy standpoint because you are in control of whether or not that information exists to the rest of the world. That is the critical differentiating factor.

I'm also assuming here that you are actively looking to have your location logged -- something most people do not explicitly sign up for before it starts happening for them (usually after it has manifested results, people accept it as some weird fact-of-life).


Got recommendation?


Hoping for one, ultimately. A starting point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30904003


That's cool, thanks




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