#google location services

[whytehousetvnews]

Police Use Google to Track Potential Suspects Police are getting warrants to obtain tracking data from Google that locates every device near a crime scene.

[sprotechs]

Google tracks our location? Disabling Google Location

Google tracks our location? Disabling Google Location

Google tracks our location. Only when we allow it to track us. But it is tracking us without our permission. How and why? Let’s discuss.

Most of us know about google location. How Google helps us to track our phone location?. We often use Google maps to get specific locations or to track down where we are. Even many apps run on Google location base to give us a better user experience. Most of the…

View On WordPress

[libr-tumbl-alternative]

Google admits it may track your location even if you disable the setting

Google has revised an erroneous description on its website of how its "Location History" setting works, clarifying that it continues to track users even if they've disabled the setting. Powered by AutoBlogger.co

[ceotech2life]

How to double your Android battery life?

How to double your Android battery life?

Smartphone helps to simplify our life and make it more productive, but it comes with a price. The more features a phone has, the more power hungry it will be. Every smartphone users know the importance of carrying a charger along with them where ever they go.

Here in this post, I’m gonna help you to improve your smartphone battery life by making certain changes in the way you use your Android…

View On WordPress

[turnpiked]

MORE INTERNET FEELINGS: Google Locations Dashboard

Disclaimer: I am probably massively late to the fact that this exists.

We do, of course, all know by now that if we have Google Location Services enabled on our devices, that Google can track our physical locations, because we never leave home these days without our phones.

If you have a Google account and you have enabled location services on your devices and left it on for awhile, you should see a relatively reliable account of your recent movements about the Universe here.  The accuracy is not what is mind-blowing (on one occasion, the data ends my journey for the day in the middle of the Charles River for some reason).  Nor should the data itself be shocking--but somehow it is.  We all know that Google collects this data.  The whole concept of "YOU are the product" should be fairly self-evident to any Internet user who is remotely awake.

No, what is striking is the way the data is curated for the end user's benefit.  And the strange ways it can make you feel.  I hate to naively wonder whether Google developers considered that when creating the dashboard area.

If you have set your "home" and "work" addresses with Google, you can get this pie chart about how much time you spend at each, and how much time you spend "out."  I need to get out more, actually, especially because my work time is likely skewed downward since I have a job that requires me to leave my office location frequently.  Google reminds those of us who are over here writing Tumblr posts about their products that they have no lives.

It can tell when I've been on planes--sort of.  Note how it didn't catch me landing in Pittsburgh on July 20.

So, this is an interesting day for me.

I started the day hung over on the couch at my dad's with my best friend on the opposite couch after a pretty rowdy evening with a huge cheap bottle of Canadian whisky and the Zac Efron movie Charlie St. Cloud (which is ridiculous by the way).

I then went to the grocery store with my bff where we spent like $70 on items for a picnic lunch which we then ate on her boyfriend's lawn and gave shitty looks to him for not eating (his excuse was that he was "eating coffee" and that it was "too early for food"--we got there at like 11AM).

I then went home, frantically packed, changed clothes, and traveled to the airport with my family.  We detoured at a Panera Bread because after 11AM brunch (which consisted of tiny breads, lox, two kinds of goat cheese, and various fruits) I didn't eat anything and was pretty hungry.

I then flew to Boston, went to my apartment, and went to my boyfriend-person's apartment where he acted sulky and slept a lot and I read books on my Kindle until the hangover caught up with me.  Did I mention I vomited in the grocery store?

In case I would forget the details, I can relive the timestamps.

the rocket is cute can we go on the rocket

Perhaps it gets to me excessively as someone who used to keep a pretty detailed manual record of my movements and daily activities (you know, the kind of person who would journal a period-by-period breakdown of days in middle school and what the teachers said to me).  But the effect is vaguely exhilarating and heartbreaking, with all those timestamps reminding me what I was doing at any given time, and, as a result, how I felt.  The data is used to tell computers how to treat me, but the natural inclination I have is to attach a story to the data, to dramatize GPS locations into life-changing moments.  It's no wonder Apple found it so easy to make this vaguely disturbing commercial or that the move Her is probably going to ruin all of our lives.  Our data literally has a sexiness to it, a sexiness that we create by interpretation.  I can watch my recent breakup happen in Google's location data, watch myself walk in circles around my neighborhood, retreat to a friend's house.  I can watch myself walk to get bagels that have comforted me.  I can watch myself wake up in my friend's Seattle apartment and watch us take the bus to a farmer's market.

I want to just stick to the memories, but the data is tantalizing, like some kind of affidavit signed by reality that these things did, in fact, actually happen.

Having stopped with the obsessive cataloguing of my early adolescence, I've become more enchanted with the snapshots, the hodgepodge, and literal disorganization of memory.  You can look at Google's data points as part of that same collage, especially because I probably won't find myself returning to them more than a few times a year (I have things to do, you know).  But despite its random tendency to place me on a street in Back Bay I've literally never visited in my life, Google Location Services has a pretty comprehensive data set about where I've gone and what I've done.  Its willingness to recapture that data into something that I can read and interpret is kind of like an unwanted slap on the ass, a snide question in my ear: "what are you doing here?"  I kind of wish it weren't there.  Or maybe that it weren't so comprehensive.  Mine didn't even start collecting data for me until December of 2012 (when I got a new phone), and even with that small sample size, the amount of information is overwhelming both emotionally and literally.

But I'm not going to turn it off.

I might want to check the affidavit again.