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Tell HN: Google forces location history be turned on to share real time location

9 points by bprasanna ↗ HN
Though i'm an avid Google Maps user and contributor for Maps, i never wanted Google Maps to store my location history. Many times Google Maps used to prompt me to turn-on the location history which i simply ignored. But, to my surprise today Google Maps has upped the ante by forcing me to enable location history if i want to share my real-time location. Which was not the case earlier. An user can share his/her real-time location upto an hour without enabling the location history. Slowly cornering an user to share the personal info doesn't seem like a good practice.

6 comments

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cimmanom
Why would you want to share your real time location anyway?
Jonnax
Imagine you're trying to find someone in a city you're both unfamiliar with. You can see where both of you are and walk towards each other.

Or let's say you're fearful of your safety. You can send your live location to someone so that if you go missing they know where you are.

Jonnax
Unfortunately it's a free product. So whatever they decide you have no choice to go along with it, if you want to continue using that feature.

WhatsApp has the same feature, if you want to give your data to Facebook instead.

I presume there are other providers that have similar functionality.

emilburzo
I never liked the realtime location sharing apps/feature built into other apps, they all had one or more of these issues:

- requires accounts / linking to accounts

- has time limit

- can't adjust location provider / update frequency

- no public urls / requires app also for the viewer

- public urls that could be guessed

- built only with driving in mind

So, (shameless plug) I made my own privacy conscious real-time location sharing Android app:

- https://graticule.link/ (tracking page demo)

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emilburzo....

mkaziz
Is it opensource? I've been looking for a location tracker to use for my family that isn't storing our locations on the side.