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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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It’s for any emergency services. If you get in a car wreck on the freeway and someone calls an ambulance, the location service tells them where on the freeway to send it, and where to send the closest firetrucks from.
9/11 really made people realize being able to locate cell phones accurately is critical. In a crisis, being able to fing where people are buried under rubble, or where exactly in a forest they’re lost, is really important.
But, stuff like that only ever happens to other people, right?
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Sorry, I’m not sure why it would natter who’s fault it is when it comes to emergency services being able to locate people.
The thing is that in crisis situations, people tend to act in unusual ways. Fumbling with a phone to adjust settings while someone is bleeding out seems like an unnecessary waste of time that could result in avoidable harm. If the stress is high enough, a person could easily forget they need to turn on GPS, or even forget how. Maybe there’s a concussion involved[ and even just placing a call is a challenge, much less finding and changing phone settings. Maybe you’re unconscious, in a ditch, and some loved one is trying to locate you. They’ll be able to tell whereyou are in general, but if your phone is in a rural area, cell toner spacing can be a 3 mile radius. If you’re in an urban environment, it’s even worse - the tower spacing is closer, but urban density makes locating an unresponsive person far harder.
Being lost in a forest alone isn’t the issue; it’s being lost, hurt, and maybe unresponsive that’s the cancern. Hypothermia will absolutely fuck up your ability to think rationally; you can forget dicking around with your phone settings.
My thing is, why go to “kidnapping?” There are so many, far more likely things that can happen to a person where you’d want emergency services to be able to find you as accurately and as quickly as possible.
OP was asking about an OSS phone, right? Not one controlled by Google[ or Apple. It’s less likely that information is being harvested for nefarious purposes, and there is real value to having that information accessible to emergency services.
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