[codelust]

I turned mine off recently, not because I am convinced there is a method that guarantees 0% data leakage, but because it is a good idea to reduce the surface area of data that you provide voluntarily to anyone.

Anyhow, what is more amusing for me is when others, like me, turn all this off and tweet away with location turned on or check into various locations on FB/FSQ or comment on what they are doing or where there are at or who they are with at regular intervals.

[sillysaurus2]

You can't "turn off" the data you give to these services. It's foolish to believe you can.

Every time you type in an address, it gets logged along with your IP addr and any tracking cookie you may have. This happens regardless of whatever setting you've told the service to respect. It's in their financial interest to gather as much data about you as possible.

[codelust]

Turn off, as in, turned off location tracking in Google.

I do not believe it is possible to break out of the surveillance state by using technology, unless you want to go the RMS route, which I am not that keen on or even sure if it works 100%. I also consider this to be a problem that is social than technological. If society largely agrees to an invasive level of snooping as a valid trade-off for reasonable security, no amount of cyrpto or anonymization will keep you safe. Privacy is a social contract that is enforced using technology. If the contract is flawed, the technology, as always, will only serve to amplify that flaw.

Meanwhile, Google is only one of the players in the data harvesting world. Starting from the ISP that you are on, everyone captures and sells your data. The only saving grace with Google is that they at least admit to doing this and provide some degree of visibility into it. There are companies out there that the average person has little idea about. For example, some of them are shipped billing data of telcos that get mined and profiled on daily basis. And that is just one company.

[this_user]

The surveillance state is already here, we have let it happen and it is unlikely to go away ever again. I think we should instead refocus the discussion. The question is not anymore how to prevent the surveillance state, but how to best live in a world like this.

[normloman]

That's an unproductive, defeatist argument. You could say that about any problem facing humanity today. It just amounts to an excuse to do nothing.

Let's instead start a discussion about shrinking the surveillance state, with the goal of one day overturning it. Even though the odds are against us. Because you gotta draw the line somewhere.

[ithkuil]

Yep, and it's the only company that allows you to turn it off.

[twelvechairs]

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/settings

[yk]

Apparently Google does not use geo IP for this tracking. ( At least it did not show any location data for me, even we I briefly turned tracking on on my tablet.) However, what Google knows and what Google shows may two different things.