Just reason #62843 to not use cloud based apps.
It is bad enough to sell adult's information, but it really crosses the line in my opinion to track and sell children's info.
This data mining is out of control, and at some point hopefully people will demand laws or there will be court cases preventing this from happening. I am not hopeful though, people blissfully ignore this huge privacy invasion and frankly rights violation.
If you're paying for something, you're the customer. If you're getting something for free, you're the product.
I don't think it's necessarily "the cloud." Lots of paid cloud services protect private data. It's the "free" service business model. When you're not paying a company for a valuable product or service, it's more than likely because your data is their actual, marketable, product. That's fine with me for their free products, but I wish that the first tier of their paid services would include data privacy protections.
Initially, to get reliable geo-location triggers with Hubitat, I had to use a combination of the Hubitat app on my smartphone, wifi and life360. Has geolocation stability with hubitat improved enough that I could just use it and wifi and drop life360?
I guess our cell phone carriers (or MVNO - like Google Fi) already track customers, so maybe we shouldn't worry about Life360 doing it as well.
Nonetheless, there are a few options that are substantially more private for which there are Hubitat integrations, including Locative, Geofency, and OwnTracks.
Going somewhere you should not be? Our vehicles and cell phones already track our every step.
I've never been able to get much out of the Hubitat geo-location, but I use the Locative app to trigger cloud endpoints attached to rule machine rules and it works wonderfully.
I have a virtual presence indicator for each person and a wifi presence sensor as well as a locative install on their device.
Tiles aren't free ...the pricing is subsidized by tracking, maybe, like smart tvs.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/06/tile-owner-life360-reportedly-sells-location-data-of-its-users-to-virtually-anyone/
You are right, it isn't necessarily the cloud.
But it sure seems like every time you turn around someone has changed a policy (secretly in some cases), or there was a data breach or something. If your data isn't there in the first place, it is much harder to get caught by these events.
I am probably the only one I know that keeps phone GPS off, Wifi on the phone off unless I am at home, don't connect with any external Wifi networks, and I don't have social media other than sites like this, which I trust (No Facebook, Twitter, etc). Strongly considering getting rid of Reddit which is the only "iffy" site I visit now. I use multiple emails that are diverse between my personal life, bills, and sites like this. And I no longer use Google on a daily basis, there are alternative search engines that don't track you.
Maybe I am paranoid, and Google probably has all my data "pieced together" but it just creeps me out to think that my every move is being watched. I am old enough that I know what it was like before all this invasiveness into our personal lives.
The only way to stop your device from being tracked by your cell carrier is by switching it off— and removing the battery.
https://www.makeuseof.com/phone-tracked-location-services-switched-off/
