Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielecook | Hacker News Reader

I like it as well - but google is almost certainly using this data to target you. I also wish I more control. Is there a way to export to GPX? It would be fun to create a heat map of your daily locations over the course of years.

View on HN

By "target", do you mean that they're using the information I voluntarily give them to provide me with more accurate and useful ads? Because, I mean, that's not a terrible trade-off.

You actually see nonzero value in more targeted ads? Genuinely asking.

Yes. I'd rather see ads for things I might actually buy than things I would never buy. If I could have an ad for a website I like instead of an ad for a website I would never go to that sounds like a good things to me.

I look at it more through a behavioral lens. If you know a lot about someone you can use that information to modify their behavior and decisions. I'd prefer to minimize behavioral triggers like and retain more influence over my own destiny.

There's no trade-off. Everything that's provided here could be done trivially on your device. You tell Google your daily movements and get back nothing in return.

Perhaps I could trivially have my device store this data. But I couldn't trivially have an always-on web interface to the information with search, timeframes, maps, etc. Let's not act like Google isn't doing anything besides data collection here.

This is something I've never gotten. I don't really mind targeted ads, they generally are more interesting to me than non targeted ads (which is a super low bar) and are worth more money, which is how all of these services are able to be "free" (and personally I would rather they are free with targeted ads in a lot of cases than having to pay, streaming services being the main exception. I know much of HN would disagree, though).

Edit: this is off topic but I also always share my location with my wife which people have mixed reactions about, which surprises me because it's been great so far. Maybe I just view this stuff differently.

I don’t click on ads so, if given the choice between targeted and non-targeted ads, I’d rather have non-targeted ones, because then at least I have a little more assurance that I’m not being tracked. The “relevance” of an ad is totally unimportant to me since I disregard them. What’s important is whether my PII is being traded around like baseball cards.

My thing I would like first is some visibility into the data that people have about me and what other entities that data goes to (Google does this somewhat which had been cool for me but I haven't found it for other places). I don't mind being tracked in many cases but no visibility makes it so even if there were things I really care about I wouldn't know about it.

yes the government is tracking you, youre very important

AFAIK Google account activity exports are limited to JSON and HTML. There may be a way to convert the JSON to GPX somehow.

Probably yes - GPSBabel is your friend for all kinds of location data conversions: https://www.gpsbabel.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com