>>Is that so ridiculous a concept? People routinely trade privacy for convenience. Sending my location to Google through their maps is ridiculously convenient.
If you cannot tell the difference between you sending your location to Google when you need to and half the people in the world sending ALL their information to Microsoft ALL the time BY DEFAULT, I don't know what to tell you.
> I am trying to understand the rationale behind this. Is there some industry or region where Long, Lat is the customary way of representing a location?
Historically, cartography was Lat,Long (1). Then software developers took over, and their natural mode of thinking inherits from thinking in x,y coordinates in 2d-graphics on the computer screen, so Long,Lat started to dominate in software. And now software dominates everything.
> Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up.
Who needs some proprietary system (there’s also a so-called “three word” competing system). Just use lat/long which are universal.
> People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.
What can be more “local” than an address and why should it be subject to outside specification?
If you consider lat/long user-unfriendly then just stuff them into URIs of some sort — URLs would work — and keep this em in a sort of DNS. Then people could name their addresses whatever they want.
>you can use such a feature to triangulate a location, I never thought of that.
Of course this is exactly what people are going to do with that kind of feature. Sharing of location data is such an obvious thing to get exploited. It is part of the human base instinct is to take any new thing to the worst places it can go. There are certain aspects that the first question should be how can this get exploited for uses other than how we want to use it. If nobody in the room can come up with a way, then you need different people in the room.
Could you provide some more info for this? My understanding was a lot of the sites that could do this, have done. If that's not the case it'd be good to see what the real picture is.
> I believe there are power and compute related reasons that you actually do need there to be a central service that manages location data.
That may be, but they could open up that service for me to run on my own server, rather than through them.
> And I guess at that point you could say "but then there should be a single tool that does location management for apps and location tracking should be entirely separate", but I'm not sure why that's any better than "there's one app but you can toggle off the objectionable parts in a really straightforward way".
I'm not following what you mean by this. Can you expand?
> If every app had to do its own geocoding, you'd have disparate experiences in apps.
And? I already have disparate experiences in apps for tons of reasons.
> but I do not recall an explicit prompt about Google collecting my location history in this way.
Weird, I'm pretty sure with my new Android phone, upon booting it up for the first time, I had to opt in to location services and a little popup explained exactly what it was doing.
>So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location.
Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing?
I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my current location requires saving all my future locations.
I'll ask blatantly: Which one is that?
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