Redefining Location Privacy: New Tools and Improvements for Android 17

As much as I hope that this feature will improve privacy, I must say I’m rather pessimistic about its adoption.

I’m thinking it’ll have much the same fate as the Precise / Approximate location split. All the (closed-source commercial) apps that I want to use which demand my location simply refuse to work if I give them only approximate location. They all demand precise location even though they don’t actually need it for anything; they just want it to collect more data (in my opinion).

I’m thinking this feature will be the same. Commercial apps could use the momentary location signal, but that would rob them of their precious location data, and we of course can’t have that! I believe they’ll just request continuous location data regardless of this feature and come up with excuses as to why it’s “necessary” for their apps to work.

Time will tell, I guess. I hope I’m wrong.