[toper-centage]

At this point we need to be able to set our reported location manually on our phones natively. I don't want any number of apps to be able to sneakily collect such data. Android sort of allows it through 3rd party apps, but Google has all incentives in not making this trivial.

[InitialLastName]

A long time ago, when I lived within dating distance of the default coordinate (maybe City Hall?) of a global-destination city, a dating site I used introduced a feature that let users set their locations manually. Within hours of rollout, the site was completely unusable due to being full of people from around the world saying "I wonder what the dating scene in $city is like?".

[rchaud]

That is still the case on some big apps like OKCupid. There are green-card hunters from poor countries that fill up the swipe queue and all have the same giveaway line:

"I'm not based in [your city], I just change the location to talk to new people". It's frequent enough that I stopped using the app altogether. OKC was already going downhill well before this.

[NaturalPhallacy]

OKC died when match bought it and they took down their blog post about why you should never pay for a dating app.

[vhanda]

Surprisingly, I don't mind that at all.

It takes a few seconds and they are really upfront about it. I can imagine OkCupid charging for such a filtering feature, but I've never paid for it just didn't seem "worth it". Especially since Match.com owns it, and I'm not really helping the underdog.

( I understand that I might not have been making a sensible economical decision, as I have many examples of not doing that in the past )

[rchaud]

How is that upfront? You want to chat with someone new, go on Omegle. This is just spam and it's directly against most TOS to spoof your location.

[Syonyk]

I would go further. At this point, the "sneaky snacky smartphone" approach to data collection (in which everything that can be collected is being collected, and probably used for things you can't imagine it would be useful for) starts to press heavily on the "And I therefore shouldn't carry a smartphone" side of the scales.

I've seen some fun papers of "Well, you could do this awful thing..." (comparison of accelerometer data to deconflict which nearby phones are in the same vehicle vs separate ones to better refine social graphs), in addition to all the stuff we know is being done (ultrasonic signals in various ads, tracking shoppers by their wifi/bt beacon MACs, etc). I assume the state of what's actually being done is far worse than what's in the papers, because someone, somewhere, though they could get a signal out of something.

Trying to "de-evil" this sort of system is, first and foremost, fiddling around the edges of what's possible (I expect various people are reading and thinking, "Oh, you think spoofing GPS will matter, cute!), but it's also remaining in the ecosystem that has, repeatedly, demonstrated that they're going to get their paws on everything they think they can justify, and then expand that over time.

There's no reason that a TV needs to be doing automatic content recognition on various inputs, but they're all doing it these days.

I've given up and I no longer carry a smartphone. I'd encourage those who can get away with it to do the same thing. You can't go hoovering up all my data from a dumber KaiOS device because it doesn't run all the apps, and if a company makes their desktop/laptop interface so painful to use to drive people to the phone interface, well, they're probably doing things I don't want to support anymore.

Trying to "reduce the harm" of smartphones, more and more, feels like trying to figure out how to mitigate the impact of a world class meth addiction by focusing on the symptoms - "Oh, you need to hydrate better!" "Here's some skin moisturizer and a toothbrush!" and so on - without ever stating that the problem is the meth and that you need to stop using that, not try to figure out how to avoid losing your teeth while doing it.

[bombcar]

I wonder if our smartphone addiction is going to look to people in the future the same way we look at smoking now.

He says whilst posting from his phone …

[Syonyk]

I sure hope so. And I hope that future is an awful lot closer. The past decade or so of teenagers can speak to just how nasty smartphone addictions can be, in terms of mental health, suicides, etc. I grew up with the internet, but we didn't have profit-driven advertising empires pretending to "connect people together" back then, either.

Part of my reason for not carrying a smartphone anymore is to be a better example to my kids, and I certainly point out couples staring at his-n-hers smartphones at a restaurant instead of actually enjoying each other's company.

Odds are good that instead of a smartphone, my daughter will just end up with her HAM license and a VHF handset instead. It'll cover the common cases direct simplex if I put a base station on the house, and my wife isn't opposed to getting her license either. :)

[ZekeSulastin]

Someone wake me up when I don't have to pay for a PO box to avoid having to announce my address to everyone within listening range - maybe my own license will still be active by then.

[bombcar]

HAM is nice also because it helps you remember that someone could be listening at any time, a lesson we often forget.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Probably worse. After all, smoking mainly just gives people more health issues. Smartphones have far more insidious sociological effects on the very fabric of society.

I think a comparison that does it more justice is to the use of leaded gasoline and its downstream effects on crime rates.

[kbos87]

This is really tough because the only purpose of Grindr is to give it your location to see who is around you. There also needs to be much stronger requirements for end user transparency about where their data is going.

[heavyset_go]

It would still serve its purpose even if you spoofed your location to be somewhere nearby or elsewhere. Nobody needs to be able to figure out exactly where specific users are/live/work via the platform.

[nerdjon]

Removing that ability removes one of the key functionality of these apps and why they are popular.

Seeing that someone is 100 ft away is a common start of a conversation. Maybe they live in the same apartment, at a local coffee shop, work in the same building. Which leads to... well...

That doesn't excuse the privacy issues though.

[heavyset_go]

Plenty of people already spoof their locations on the app and the app itself offers location changing functionality, I'd hardly say that is removing functionality or defeating the purpose of the app.

[fennecfoxy]

It's not the start of a conversation in my experience. If they're that close then you'd just say hi.

The types of people that open with "I'm 50m away from you" are super freaking creepy.

[bobro]

dont they? isnt the point that you share your true location and in return see others’ true locations?

[mrguyorama]

Tindr straightforwardly sells the option to "Swipe" from other locations.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It's a shame that LineageOS doesn't let you spoof apps with bogus data anymore. It's much easier to let them think they're getting permissions than try to play whack-a-mole with opt out settings that could get reset at any time by bad actors.

[a-dub]

my understanding was that the first instance of that was way back in cyanogenmod back in the late 00s and that it was quashed when google basically said "we'll let you bootleg the play store, but only if you don't screw up revenue streams by feeding app developers garbage data"

[GekkePrutser]

They have come even closer to Google now, I'm sure they'd love to be an official distribution with play apps included out of the box if they could. Fair enough though, most of their userbase sideload Google services.

I use it with microg myself but I have to use a special fork. I wish microg had this option too, it would be great to be able to feed garbage.

[heavyset_go]

Even if you use 3rd party apps, Google location services will side step your mocked location. Apps can detect mocked locations, as well.

Pretty sure SafetyNet, or something like it, from Google will also tattle on you if you spoof your location in apps that don't want you using mock locations, preventing you from using mock locations at all with apps.

[est31]

Android 12 finally has a feature to select approximate location per-app. iOS has supported this for a bit longer, since version 14. The accuracy of the "approximate" location is also much bigger for Android 12 than it is for iOS, but it's a good start.

[Melatonic]

If you enable "mock locations" in the Android developer settings I believe you can do just that. It has been awhile though

[brailsafe]

You can do this in the developer setting on Android I think

[mistrial9]

> we need to be able to set our reported location manually on our phones

down-low, we have an emergency

[m3047]

There's a funny thing about cellphone modulation: makes it hard to locate a device. Cell phones need GPS so they can give their location to the eNBs (towers) so that the best tower can be selected, the towers can't do it on their own.

[g_p]

GPS isn't required to schedule handovers in a mobile network.

Handovers can be signalled by the network or the handset, but they use the received signal quality and strength (and handsets can send their signal quality and strength to the network to facilitate better handover scheduling) to arrange handovers.

You can also triangulate devices effectively using just the cellular signal to them, if you are the mobile network operator, using signal strength, or other techniques like time difference of arrival, if you have good clock sync across your base stations.