Back in May 2018, K. Shankari posted a blog post on the blurry boundaries associated with Google location tracking and the interesting questions that they raised around consent, control and competition.
An AP reporter, Ryan Nakashima, saw the blog posts, and contacted her for more details. While he was not able to reproduce the behavior that she had observed, he was able to work with Jonathan Mayer‘s group at Princeton to find similarly unclear and confusing privacy policies related to location history.
The resulting story and step-by-step guide was posted on Monday, Aug 13, and had a large impact. In the technical press, it was picked up by at least Wired, CNET, TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Slashdot. Ryan, Jonathan and Shankari were also interviewed by NPR and Shankari was interviewed by CBS.
Congratulations to Ryan Nakashima and Jonathan Mayer on picking up a speculative blog post and doing the additional digging to convert it to a “bombshell” story.
Edit: An earlier version of this post was written in the first person.