Comment by aeturnum
5 hours ago
They do ask the device owner - if you review the location services description on android[1] you will see they explicitly say they collect this information from your device. I strongly disagree that they need to get government permission for this - they are simply recording signals that reach the device, akin to making notes about what kinds of cars you see. This is not a thing a government should have control over people doing and not a thing that should be registered with the governement.
[1] https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281?sjid=66634...
In the article you refer to, I see no mention of asking user's permission. However, I remember, when using an old version of Android, there indeed was a popup nagging me to allow sharing location data with Google every time I enabled GPS. Very annoying, makes you want to never enable GPS in the first place.
Regarding the government, the problem is that many people do not fully understand the mechanism of collecting the data. I remember the case when members of US military disclosed the location of secret objects through fitness tracker app. And they were probably smarter than average smartphone user. Obviously it would be better if enabling GPS required an approval from their commander.
I suppose they don't "ask you" in the same way that gmail never presents the user with a dialog explaining that gmail needs to store their emails in order to provide their email service. Instead they explain how the location service works and you can decide if you want to enable or disable it.
I'll agree that militaries would prefer their soldiers to not to dumb things - but I don't agree that it's 'obviously' best if people needed permission to enable GPS! If that's the case depends a lot on which soldier is enabling the GPS and their relation to me. In general I would say that government control of people recording and distributing their observations is associated with the most authoritarian governments and by claiming we should get government permission you appear to be aligning yourself with an authoritarian approach to data controls.