[commoner]

Instructions for deleting your location history and disabling location reporting on a Google account:

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687

It's unclear whether this is enough to prevent a geofence warrant from sweeping up your data.

For additional security, an Android user can stop using Google Play Services for geolocation. This can be done by disabling Google Play Services or switching to an Android distribution without Play Services, at the cost of slowing down the process of getting a location lock (since Play Services uses Wi-Fi and cell tower trilateration to accelerate this).

Another solution is to replace Play Services with microG, which allows you to use a selection of non-Google location providers for trilateration, including ones that work fully offline. Android distributions that pre-install microG include CalyxOS, LineageOS for microG, and /e/. Alternatively, DivestOS includes the location module of microG (UnifiedNlp) but not the other parts.

[jcadam]

I suppose it's time to stop carrying tracking devices around with us everywhere we go.

[ThinkBeat]

I find it is always instructive to ponder how intelligence services or law enforcement had to work prior to the high technology we have these days.

If a government body wanted to know where you were - always, they would need to send a team to watch you.

This could be made much easier by recruiting a coworker or two, a neighbor or two, to keep an eye out if you did something other than what was expected.

Informants help scale the system.

If they wanted to know who you were contacting, they would need someone to tap your phone (in one way or another).

Your mail is easily intercepted and checked.

All of it would consume resource that were not endless. There were limits on how many people Stasi could watch at the same time, even with informers.

Now, nearly all of this can be done without any human resources being spent and truly little cost overall. It even worse retroactively. Where were you two years ago in December 12?

That would be hard to figure out for even a nation state in 1930. (Unless you were already being watched).

Now it is trivial.

It is available to the US, and all Western nations, as well as most nations at a certain technological level.

The US uses fragments of it to kill people on a regular basis. Without any bothersome judicial oversight.

I keep thinking that Stasi leaders would have continues orgasms if they had access to the tools that are available for a nation state now.

[swiley]

This. Just don’t bring the phone. I have a notebook for important things and a VHF radio for sailing. In the car I have a road atlas. The phone is moderately more convenient but it’s just not worth the cost.

[ThinkBeat]

With the documentation Snowden made available about the cooperation between Google (and others) and the national intelligence services I tend to doubt that such things are ever really deleted.