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That is basically the middle of London. I expect hundreds of thousands of people pass through the area in the screenshot every day. The density of people there is so high that the location really can't be linked to anyone specific. Plus it is real time location so you can't distinguish if this is a person's home, someone at work, someone checking the app while sitting on a bus, etc. This location data would be much more dangerous if it was showing the manually entered addresses of users, a screenshot of an area with a low density of people, or if you had constant access and could identify patterns of locations to identify individuals.


Mayfair and Marylebone are a mix of individual houses and 5-8 storey apartment blocks. It’s not that anonymous depending on the address.


To be devil's advocate, since London is coated with CCTV some bad actor (think state or organisation with access to said CCTV) here could probably combine the location timestampw with CCTV images and identify people.

I am sure some civil servent could argue that know if people in "positions of power" were using suchs apps that opened them up bo blackmail and that they should be therefore checked as aprecaution.


If you've ever had a crime committed against you in London you'll know just how useless the CCTV can be. The quality is often so bad you can't really get anything useful from it, and in many cases the camera isn't even on/working/recording to anything.


I had my bike nicked a few weeks ago in London. Turns out the council installed new HD/4K cameras that very morning right where I left it - they managed to ID and arrest the perp, and charge him with multiple other thefts too.

So it looks like the crappy cctv is getting an upgrade


Did you get the bike back?


Unfortunately very little chance of that, long sold


At this moment it might be a concern, but in another 20-30 years (especially as organized religion fades in some countries) people will stop seeing sex as a shameful thing.

Privacy is important, however, so apps/services should not leak this kind of info. That's still a thing regardless of what the repercussions of leaked data could mean.


No state organization has access to all that CCTV. Most of them are private cameras, and most are not networked. Some of the local authorities in central London do have networked cameras facing the streets, but it's not nearly as bad as you're suggesting.




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