that most definitely is the reason to ask for wifi scanning, but the point was reiterated many times in the post. This is about privacy AND the fact that GPS-only navigation works globally just fine. If the user wishes to have that improved cold start approximate location then sure, turn on wifi scanning. If they do not wish to give that up, they should still be able to navigate
So if an app knows your exact lat long after 30s of spending battery power there's no privacy issue but if it uses wifi SSIDs around you to do the job in 2s with less power it's a breach of privacy?
Because it adds to the software complexity. several boolean toggles for deciding what to incorporate into the localization algorithm: one toggle for GPS, another for wifi, Bluetooth, cell tower, barometer, etc. and fusing these in all the various combination, testing them, etc.
and after doing all that users will mess up their config and then complain that this app sucks not knowing someone on HN had this feature request for "privacy" reasons even though it's pretty unclear to me what privacy is being gained here.
Apple products generally don't give the user much choice and decide what's right for the UX and it's served them well
Though the software complexity was already there, and they decided to remove it (by adding another kind of software complexity), effectively deleting a feature that apparently people are using.
It cannot even be claimed to be an UX improvement since it's creating disruption for everybody that had this feature disabled.
At this point they should have added it to the terms of use and deleted the toggle directly (which I suspect they are going to do down the line, when they can prove that nobody keeps that toggle off).
you misunderstand completely. sending a complete list of SSIDs from your surrounding perfectly tied to an exact GPS location gets you a map of the world and precise-enough location based solely off of SSID data. They are having customers build their database to track you later when you use any G-app that has wifi access but not gps access, they would then know your approximate location while reading emails.
