AlgoCompSynth by znmeb
@arclight Well ... OK ... but you and I and every other cell phone user pays a tax every month to support 9-1-1 service, and part of that is that your phone must track its location and make that available to fire/police/ambulance if you call for help.
The rest of it is surveillance capitalism, yes, and some would like to eliminate the 9-1-1 connection on ideological grounds. But it's there until the law changes.
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb
@arclight If I wake up at 5 AM having a heart attack I want the ambulance crew to know where I am.
Rich Felker
@AlgoCompSynth @arclight It doesn't need to, and doesn't, report location for E911 purposes until the 911 call is made. This is a completely irrelevant and erroneous apologism for surveillance.
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb
@dalias @arclight I understand that. But the technology has to be there. I can turn location off and still call an ambulance. But how am I going to get the businesses / apps I interact with to stop demanding my location? That requires that I either stop doing business with them, or get crowned King and issue an edict.
Rich Felker
@AlgoCompSynth @arclight No, it just requires a phone that works on your behalf rather than Google's or Apple's.
Rich Felker
@AlgoCompSynth @arclight There absolutely is. Any phone running @postmarketOS (completely non Android) or @GrapheneOS or most other non-vendor deGoogled Android) would be an example. Even stock Android rooted lets you block or spoof location to apps.
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb
@dalias @arclight There ain't no such phone and anybody that says they have one is being less than truthful.
AlgoCompSynth by znmeb
@dalias That is something I have neither the skills to do nor the willingness to learn. I'm done with this conversation.
Rich Felker
@AlgoCompSynth I didn't say you could, just that they exist and it's our responsibility (those of us who understand the domain) to make them accessible to everyone.
Rich Felker
@GrapheneOS @arclight OSs targeted like this need a hot patching feature to remove the detection from such malicious apps.
GrapheneOS
Standard Android does have the Mock Location feature. The issue is that apps can detect it and ban other OSes, which apps like location-based games are doing and are increasingly using Play Integrity's strong tier.
Most of these apps are already banning using GrapheneOS. A tiny minority are whitelisting the official builds. For user builds, they might as well turn off letting apps see Mock Location or Location Scopes is active, but we'd like official ones to not be banned.
GrapheneOS
Our own Location Scopes feature would be a separate thing so there's no reason the Mock Location API would need to show it as enabled. Location would not be coming from a Mock provider, so it doesn't make sense to set that. This would make it more compatible.
To avoid apps like Pokemon Go banning GrapheneOS, we could provide our own API to detect it which the vast majority of apps wouldn't use. Only apps which ban an alternate OS and decide to special case some would use it.
GrapheneOS
We're going to be adding a Location Scopes feature soon similar to our Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes to replace Mock Location. Mock Location works but requires a dedicated app and is global when people probably usually only want to do it for specific apps rather than breaking location detection for Organic Maps or whatever else they use for maps/navigation, etc.
Mock Location has an API to detect using it but there's no point hiding it since apps would ban GrapheneOS.
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