As I made clear previously, I am not questioning anybodies decision to take advantage of the service that's being offered here.
No, you weren't, but I was trying to give insight into why someone might have such a preference. It's not as arbitrary as wanting polkadots on the camera body. Many might not consider the issue to be a big deal, and that is their privilege (by symmetry) but at least I've spelled it out.
Although if one really is concerned with how honest or secure Canon software is when reporting a feature as off, one should also be skeptical of the service at hand. It is after all performed by Canon and by their own admission is just a firmware change, not a removal of hardware. They even point out that there's no guarantees of security with this in the footnotes.
And that, for some reason, I hadn't caught earlier. That being said, putting on the paranoid mindset I just described it
only guards against accidental turning on of the features. Depending on what happens when the camera resets, it may guard against them turning on then, too, if that isn't already something that survives various resets (e.g., popping the battery to "unfreeze" your R5).
As such, it seems to be quite an expense for little benefit, since it's *still* a soft switch. But that's a cost benefit analysis and that's as individual as can be.
My point was and still is that this is technology and not magic. You can't observe a user's position from the outside just because they use a GPS device. There needs to be some compromised component inside the device that transmits this information to the outside. Probably over a network, at which point the GPS becomes irrelevant, as being connected to a network in itself has the potential to be tracked.
And I agreed with that. A GPS
receiver by itself is "passive" and transmits nothing. And any real-time transmission would likely have to be over a network. But one thing you're missing is the potential that a compromised camera could record where you've been (while off network) and transmit it later. For that matter, it can and will record where you've been when you take the pictures, in the EXIF data. This can be stripped out provided your software knows about those fields, but are you sure that's the only place it's being encoded in the picture? The only way to be *completely* Tom-Clancy-level safe from this is to not have the GPS in the first place.
