tekato

If you don’t want the NSA to spy on you, don’t use anything with a modem. Otherwise forget about it.

I didn’t even know it asked for an email for sign up. I just remember the recovery email.

I don't think you are required to provide a secondary email, but you get less features without it.

I doubt somebody running from a government is taking their tips from wired.com

They do store it and have provided it to authorities in the past. In their defense, modern laws require you to hand over any data you have or get shut down. But they already knew that, yet choose to ask for it anyways knowing that they have to give it away if asked to.

Yes, looks like the actual advantage (or disadvantage , depending on who you are) is ensuring that you don’t send a false location to a third party.

You then execute that SNARK on your local device with your current exact GPS coordinates

No, that’s what I’m suggesting. The proposed method in the paper makes no use of GPS, instead it’s some peer-to-peer network.

You mean the hexagon? What prevents you from mapping your GPS output to a hexagon?

How is this better than just mapping GPS data to a hexagon and sending that to the third-party?

Don't see the point of this standard which runs over an inferior type of networking

Inferior how? Matter is not comparable to Z-Wave. Z-Wave is a mesh network, Matter is just a standard which would allow Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. to control the same devices. To allow Z-Wave like functionality, Matter is able to work on top of Thread, which is in fact superior to Z-Wave.

is brought to us by the companies that created the interoperability problem in the first place

Of course. You don’t want to be the company known for refusing to participate in an open standard, even if you secretly don’t want it to succeed. Anyways, there’s no reason for companies to not want an open standard for controlling smart devices, since it literally helps everyone support more devices for basically no effort once you add support for Matter.