Comment by hn3er1q
1 month ago
> Do you consider this feature to be a violation of your privacy, requiring an opt-in?
I suppose in some sense it is, as it a reverse-geo lookup service, but it's also no where near to the front in the location privacy war.
Cell phone providers basically know your exact position at all times when you have your phone on you, credit card companies know basically everything, cars track driving directly, etc. etc.
I can see why some people would be up in arms but for me this one doesn't feel like missing the forest for the trees, it feels like missing the forest for the leaves.
I very much agree with your position. There are legitimate questions to be asked about this feature being opt-in, although we may find that you implicitly opt-in if you enable Apple Intelligence or similar.
But the argument that this specific feature represents some new beachhead in some great war against privacy strikes me as little more that clickbate hyperbole. If Apple really wanted to track people’s locations, it would be trivial for them to do so, without all this cloak and dagger nonsense people seem to come up with. Equally, is a state entity wanted to track your location (or even track people’s locations at scale), there’s a myriad of trivially easy ways for them to do so, without resorting to forcing Apple to spy on their customers via complex computer vision landmark lookup system.