[Nexus 5 General] t3xboar:
Man, is it me or are people overly paranoid about anything and everything? Not to rain in on anyone's parade here, but what exactly are you doing "online" to be scared someone will find out about??

Wasn't it Eric Schmidt that said " If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. "

Really now. leaving your location gps base option on doesn't affect you in any way. you really think someone is sitting at a computer in the google office going "oh snap! Bob is at the cupcake shop! quick!" why freak out about it? you do know that regardless of if you turn it on or off - your cell provider has the same ability and they never told you about it? cell broadcasts know where you are too - and deliver death warnings in emergencies. I hope you turned those off too right? no? why not? its the same thing. its tracking you 24/7. and if you happen to walk into a radiation zone for instance it will alert you with bells and whistles. you cant complain about 1 company doing this when the cell providers have been doing the same thing since the birth of cell phones themselves!

And to the person who mentioned the pedophile comment... about making an account, stalking on facebook, downloading images, extracting the gps loc out of the xif info of the image, then finding your family.. ermm... I'm not saying it cant happen - but do you really think they would waste a huge amount of time on this planning when a rented van and a playground could be found in under 15 minutes?? Don't get me wrong, I'm really not advocating this kind of sick behavior at all but you have to apply a little common sense here.

You are the one posting pictures, regardless of who or what they are. you are the one using your phone. regardless if its an iphone or an android. everyone under the sun knows by now to turn off location tagging inside the camera app. Your own fault if nude pics (as an example) show up inside your facebook feed with your address... cant blame google, apple or anyone else.

I leave my phone on, with all the options activated, doing anything and everything it wants, at any time. That was the entire point of buying a phone. to use everything on it. I honestly don't understand why people buy something then cripple the usage by turning things off. Do you buy a big V8 muscle car for the looks then in your garage disable 4 cylinders to get better gas mileage? its silly... buy a different phone instead. (in this case one that just makes phone calls with no internet)

What's that you say? you need internet? aww.. well. thats the trade off. everything you do is tracked by your ISP, regardless of google or not. I should know. I worked in that department for one of the canadian ISPs years back. everything is logged. everything is tracked. does anyone give a **** internally? nope. unless we had a judge serve papers it just sat there and eventually got overwritten by new data. you know how much data was saved on a day to day basis? the numbers would boggle the mind. If you honestly think someone would dig through 500+ Terabytes of data to find your 650kb facebook picture.. man...lol..... This isnt new or news in any way. you think knowing every little thing you searched for on the internet started with google? pfff common.. common sense again please. do you type out all your bank account numbers and passwords into a text file and save it to your desktop? Then why in the world would you type it all into a cloud service???? would you write it on a piece of paper and leave it on your table for anyone to see? no you wouldn't! common sense again! so why are you blaming a company or service if you are doing things there that you wouldn't dream of doing pen-and-paper style?

It comes down to this. ask yourself why you are really scared someone might find out what you are doing. really dig deep and figure out why you would be scared to let anyone sit at your computer or look through your phone randomly, before you had a chance to clear out your history and browsing habits, and take a look at where you are going and what you are looking at daily.

Then repeat Schmidt's sentence - If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with google, apple, or any of the million ISP's or cell companies for putting out products and services that use/need data to function. Nobody is going to look in on your shoe shopping or spy on you buying a new lawnmower, because in the grand scheme of things nobody actually gives a **** about what you or I are doing in your minuscule tiny bubble of normal everyday lives. - quit being paranoid for nothing. Thinking that the world revolves around you, that you're above everyone else or someone has chosen you to be special and "spied" upon is insane on the face of it, and goes against the very reality that you honestly are just a drop in the bucket where data is concerned.

If you are buying yellow cake uranium - serves you right for being stupid and you deserve to be flagged for trying to kill us all. :rolleyes: