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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Two things that happened to me:

A) I walk into a store, get a notification from google photos asking me "I see you're at store X, wouldn't you like to take some pictures?". Possibly to use as part of google maps. Thinking back I think this is when I started de-googlifying my life.

B) I get a notification from google maps asking me "you're travelling to place X soon, wouldn't you like to download an offline map, just in case you don't have connection there?" Google must have learned that because I had the plane ticket on gmail.

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#1 is so obnoxious. No Google, I won't do free work for you. At least offer me some store credit.

I was taking photos of locations I visited. Google Explorer's program offered free 100GB of Google Drive space once you reached a certain level. About a month after I started they changed the promotion and took away the Drive space. So I deleted all my photos and stopped taking new ones.

Never work for free.

> So I deleted all my photos and stopped taking new ones.

When you're "deleting" things from services like Google Drive, it's better to think of what you're doing as "hiding things from yourself". It's unlikely that Google actually deleted that data in a way that prevents them from accessing it.

I've just been looking through the app, it doesn't really describe that well what the "points" system even earns you, for your contributions.

The help page has this vague statement saying "Those points lead to higher levels of the program, as well as benefits like early access to Google features and special perks from partners"

Obviously covering their backs because "special perks from partners" could mean anything

Do you pay for their service? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They make money by showing me ads, so yes, I do. Just not in a direct monetary exchange.

I think they paid as much for google maps on their android phone as an iphone user pays for apple maps, right?

I look at the ads they serve me so yes I do pay for their services, just not directly.

If you sign up for the local guides program, there are some various minor benefits you get in return.

But besides that, I think the "payment" you get in return is the quality of Google Maps itself. Features like being able to tell when a restaurant is most busy can't realistically exist without automatically collecting data about users who are visiting it throughout the day.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I find data collection of that sort -- where the data is directly being used to improve the product -- acceptable. What I find much more unacceptable is tracking for the purpose of showing ads. Although companies try to say they're "improving the experience" by showing targeted ads, I'd rather not constantly be bombarded with things that are engineered to extract as much of my attention as possible. (yes, I realize location tracking is used to target advertisement, which is why I keep location services enabled and block ads)

Disclaimer: I work for Google (but not on Maps)

I really don't see a use-case for A from the consumer perspective. Why would anyone ever want such a notification?

For case B we can see where scraping all this information can be genuinely useful.

> I really don't see a use-case for A from the consumer perspective. Why would anyone ever want such a notification?

Most people don't, but it's a game of numbers. If everyone gets the notification, then 0.01% start taking photos and populate Google Maps with the largest, live-est dataset of restaurant and business information in the world. Then all the consumers get access to this information in a nice format in their phone when it matters.

That's supposed to be the deal. Google is banking on this not being insanely annoying to most people, which, maybe is where they have miscalculated and made an error.

And, honestly, I'm not even sure they've miscalculated. It's bothered this one developer enough to write a blog post about it, and several other people on HN agree with that sentiment, but I think more data is needed before we reject a null hypothesis that the dominant user response is "Don't really care one way or the other."

Who knows what they're thinking. Might be just playing numbers. Or maybe they only show that notification after you've been at that store several times which means you must really like it, and they're hoping that you go "why yes google, I'd quite like some pictures of this store!". It was my local supermarket by the way.

And I started using Google's phones because I could see the potential for things like B. Hell yes, I want my phone to be aware of things in my email inbox. I want it to be more aware.

That's great. Different people want different things. My phone no longer does that :-)

Frankly Google needs to be broken up. They pulled the "we're a cool company doing ethical and interesting stuff" for far too long." They are too big to exist.

I wonder if Matt Cutts is still shilling for Google, talk about losing respect.

Agreed.

Check his G+: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts

Matt Cutts has actually posted several times recently about things that irritate him about Google products. He still uses them though, of course.

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