[cc439]

This is one of those massive privacy violations that I cannot believe has been allowed to exist as long as it has without people making a concerted effort against it. I remember way back in the early days of Android when it was excused for reasons of allowing Google's live traffic mapping feature to work.

That excuse made sense in a time where public trust in these companies was justifiably high but it's turned into a situation where the major tech giants have the power to become a modern day Stasi on steroids (and increasingly show their willingness to play that role). We had to place enormous trust in these company's ethics (mostly on a subconscious level as they all used to go to great lengths to afford us the ability to implicitly trust them) in order for the smartphone/mobile revolution to occur. Now that these devices are a necessity in modern society, they've all dropped the pretenses that allowed us to trust anything to do with the information they're collecting.

We're living in a cyberpunk dystopia and I don't see an easy way out.