How fateful?
chan.co.za
chan.co.za
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
Randomness is fine, just get enough smart people on it to learn about the distribution etc.
That is why we can't explore things that we "might" consider nice. A product that might have been.
Most likely they tried this and realised the results are biased. Imagine what data Facebook has about you, they know you live in X1 city, have visited X2 & X3 places recently, have attended X4 & X5 events, have interacted with X6 & X7 pages. Then if they try and match you with other people who have similar profiles, we get headlines such as "Facebook Dating only matches <insert minority> people with other <insert minority> people" as it's biases on hyper-local location.
Using other data such as "Person A likes band Y, we will only match them with other people who like that band too!" doesn't really make sense, as that isn't a requirement to have a good relationship... Unless by liking a band page, you really mean "I religiously go to every concert and could not date a person who does not also do that". So they might as well just do the same as Tinder / Bumble / etc and show anyone within X miles of your location.
The only advantage they really have is your friends circle, so they could use that to suggest friends of friends (of friends?), but I imagine that would quickly be exhausted if they only displayed matches from that.
Sync that up with Apple Watch 8's ability to estimate ovulation, and poof, declining birth rate problem solved!
I'm scared.
Or maybe it declines more rapidly? Women could just use the cycle prediction to avoid fun time on “risky” days.
> I'm scared.
That is one dystopia I might be able to live with.
As long as the watches don't default to Harvey Fierstein.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Will never happen. Children are expensive, and once you have them, you'll never ever again be able to afford most of the Apple products.
Obviously, the incentive for Apple (and Google) is that you don't have children, which can explain the low birth rates in developed (rich) markets.
> I'm scared.
Now I'm also scared.
A Date in 2025 https://youtu.be/NZ8G3e3Cgl4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
(Google's famous ad, "Parisian Love", worth watching for those who haven't seen it yet)
After all, "who" is in charge or has access to the data? Maybe even an unknown individual or group, with their own agenda, and outside of Google's stated corporate goals or awareness.
I have no idea the name of the story or its author but it was a nice hopeful take where machine intelligence doesn't decide to enslave or destroy humanity.
And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he. In meeting at the right time, stars are aligned, it was the right time to intersect. Or perhaps a host of other reasons. There may have been better times, perhaps bounded for this success quite close to or at the time you didn 'meet'. And who knows what other 'success' could have worked out - collaborators in something, getting together when 're meeting' - we don't know, an individual's life's not repeatable, and that in itself is beautiful.
It is indeed fascinating mapping and wondering, and probably applicable to a lot. But not to downplay the philosophical side, as that's important, and important the OP included it.
I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!
It's just as possible that for a given person, molecules could have changed somewhere or even "bigger" events could have happened one or more times, and their existence would have remained. Automatically assuming a chaos of infinite possibilities with completely divergent universe is potentially reducing the complexity of the world and its countless smaller stabilizing feedback loops that locally do reduce divergences. Otherwise we'd never do anything for fear of spontaneously exploding or other funny things.
https://moorsidepublications.com/2015/07/01/babbage-gets-inv...
"They were on a collision course and both would have been travelling at 40 miles an hour."
What an amazing story. Thanks.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2015/apr/12/t...
Perhaps it would all be more depressing than that though, exposing the small, repetitive worlds we live in. For my part, I have tried to road-trip, travel more often than others in my family have done, tried too to expose my kids to travel when growing up so they can experience a slightly bigger loop across the face of this small planet.
Very fascinating indeed. Imagine all the near-misses, as well. Like you were in the exact location of a childhood sweetheart, soon-to-be girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, but separated by 30 minutes. Perhaps, if had waited 30 minutes later, would have ran into a dream woman, who would have been the perfect wife.
This is a really good point. My wife and I often laugh about how in high school especially and college too we wouldn’t likely have been friends, much less good romantic partners. Both of us then were different people yet now both of us are perfect for each other.
But back then? Likely not even friends.
Man this is really key. relationships is a skill. I don't believe in soul mates, but rather a healthy relationship is developed when two people have honed the skill enough to be able to handle conflict without causing irreparable harm, and enjoy each other out of conflict.
My wife and I were very aligned, right from early on, concerning financial disposition and family goals. We got that right out in the open early. We completely merged our financial lives and closed on a house, both names on the deed, both names on the mortgage, a year before we got engaged. When we got engaged, we couldn't afford an engagement ring, joint decision on that, and one of her friends got up in my face about it, 'where is the commitment?'. My dear fiancee held her ring finger up against the house and said "this is the commitment".
That common ground, those common goals, has made everything that followed much easier. Thirty years this past Spring.
In other words I don't think who we end up with is some 1 in a million cosmic star aligning moment, it's probably more like 1 in 100 and many people would be as good or a better fit than who we end up with. The time you spend with your person is more important than some intrinsic value you both bring at the start.
Your love is one in a million
You couldn't buy it at any price
But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine hundred thousand other possible loves
Statistically some of them would be equally nice
Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you
Or dumber, but better at sport or... fuckin' tracing?
I'm just saying
I really think that I would, probably
Have somebody else
If I didn't have you
Someone else would do
I suspect that you're right for most people, but those odds will be better or worse depending on the person and their circumstance. For some people, it probably is closer to 1 in a million, or could even be worse. Some go their entire lives meeting people and never finding one. There's probably not much harm in feeling a bit lucky to have found your person, especially if you suspect at least one of your odds were worse than most.
I've had relationships not work out for varying reasons, including going on vacation 'at the wrong time', or someone's ex visiting the city and making her feel like she can't 'move on' at the moment, stuff like that.
And I went through my own dating phase in which I was less mature and not ready to settle down with many of the people I met. Quite a few of them were perfectly great women with whom I likely could have lasted in a long-term relationship (of course, we can never really know). As I see it, the timing wasn't right, either for me (mostly for me) or for them. It was only after a few years of this that I was in the right mindset to stay with the person I happened to be dating at the time. Sure, that probably doesn't sound great, and I probably won't discuss this at length with my wife, but it's the way I view the world. I'd wager that something like 80% of the people I went on more than three dates with were 'compatible' enough that I'd pursue a relationship with them, but it only worked out long-term with the last one because we were both in the same mindset to give an earnest effort at making our relationship work at the same place and same time.
So, using dumb analogy math, 1/X (compatible person) chance times 1/Y (right timing, maturity, life experience, etc.), it works out to a lower probability 1/(X*Y).
My wife and I dated through undergrad, broke up at "get married or break up." And ended coming back together as adults with more life and relationship experience. Based on plans, we never should have been back in the same city. And when we started hanging out again, neither expected a relationship, just a friendship still being sick of each others' sh. But we had both grown up. We're 24 years into our relationship now. I think it's going well.
That's all purely anecdotal, though.
I don't think real math could be done with this. Success isn't measurable. People often split due to $ or tragedy. People stick it out, miserable the entire time. It walks into Aristotle's eudaimonia. You can't know until it's over. Even then, quantifying quality is folly.
People who's marriages I thought would go on till death (Bezos's, Gates's, Carmack's, and most recently Tom Brady's) can have the scales tipped into the direction of "leave for reason X and take what you can from him (and sometimes her) on the way out", whether out of vindictiveness or perceived entitlement, even if the money wasn't the primary cause or objective.
One thing that I find a little weird about the Bezos divorce is that there are a lot of claims that it will make MacKenzie Bezos “the world’s richest woman.” I suppose there is a technical sense in which that is right, but it assumes not only that she will have a right to half of Jeff Bezos’s assets in divorce, but also that she has no such right in marriage. That strikes me as a strange way to think about marriage, and about the “community property” laws that might give her half the assets in divorce. (Surely those laws imply that she is in a sense a joint owner now?) I would have thought the more straightforward analysis is that she is the world’s richest woman now, because she is a member of a married couple that has more money than any other single person or married couple on the planet, but I guess that is not how the scorekeeping works.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-10/bezos-...
Property is a social construct; marital property no more or less than any other, and likewise no more or less a fiction.
> . Prior to their divorce, if Jeff wanted to dump all his Amazon stock, I doubt he needed MacKenzie's permission to do it.
Yes, marriage is exactly like a general partnership in that, absent explicit agreement or special legal treatment of particular property, any partner can dispose of property of the partnership.
Also, like a general partnership in that the property legally ascribed to the partnership rather than partners individually is divided among the partners as personal property at dissolution.
So pre-divorce MacKenzie could have unilaterally decided to dump Jeff's Amazon shares on the market without his permission?
She could have burnt down Bezos's Medina home to bits and he couldn't sue for damages, even if he payed for the construction, property taxes, other bills, and was sole owner of the deed?
She could have access to any separate bank accounts he owned, and blown it all?
> Also, like a general partnership in that the property legally ascribed to the partnership rather than partners individually is divided among the partners as personal property at dissolution.
A partnership in and of itself doesn't create any obligations other than the acknowledgement of said partnership. There isn't a presumption of combined ownership. A partnership is the explicit creation of a contract that both parties agree to. If a contract is voided, one is no longer required to perform any duties or continue providing resources.
In a marriage, the terms are set by the state and there is a presumption of combined ownership. Even if a prenup to the effect of "I keep what I earned, you keep what you earned" exists, a judge can ignore it.
So is a marriage. In both cases, there are default consequences in law that apply in the absence of contrary explicit agreement, particularly (relevant to thr current issue) as regards property attributable to the relationship, including which property that is.
> If a contract is voided
That’s not relevant, here. Voiding a contract is cancellation, due to a legal defect that makes it categorically invalid (if completely prohibited) or voidable at the discretion of a party (such as when one party was a child when making it); the marital case of voiding a contract is annulment, not divorce.
Divorce is termination of a contract, not voiding.
I'm aware of that and seeing as the Bezos's marriage did not have a pre-nup, Jeff was relatively fortunate. But my concern is with how marriages are treated as legal institutions apart from how commercial contracts are upheld.
In a partnership, two private parties can create a contract by themselves. The state is not involved in the creation of a contract. The state will only involve itself with the contract's enforcement or the resolution of any suits arising from its dissolution. The state works within the body of laws it's upheld, but almost all rights stated in the contract supersede the default assumptions held by the state.
When it comes to marriage, the state (via the court) is deemed its creator, enforcer, and dissolver. A divorce can only be granted under the acceptance of the state's terms. A judge can decide to ignore precedent or the upholding of a pre-nup.
Thus, take such stories online with a grain of salt. Especially since many are blind to their own faults, and therefore can't include them in their stories.
I agree that it is important to take a person's examination of his/her self or his/her (ex-)spouse with a grain of salt. And while people are blind to their own faults, you're making the mistake of thinking that divorces are based on falsifiable and rational assessments. Some are. Some aren't. But one isn't likely know the true reason a long time after the fact, if at all.
It would be an equitable portion of our collective stuff, not 1/2 of mine. There is no “yours” when you’re married. That’s a big part of what marriage means. Even pre-modern and across many cultures, marriage has been viewed as a contract.
Money (or lack thereof) is one of the primary motivators in her experience. A lot of “rich people” get divorces when they’re in debt up to their eyeballs and the consequences hit.
We’re not struggling, not wealthy, and are pretty equally valued. Also, there’s more than stuff. The burden of children, a household, and even our own lives would be much greater solo. We’re a pretty great support system for each other.
There is no perfect marriage. Part of my point. I think mine’s great. We’ll see when we’re dead or divorced.
At some point in the past I had the surreal experience of opening a news website and seeing a familiar face on the front page. Not a celebrity, rather a man whose face had been in some small subfolder of my brain for several years.
The man had been convicted of serial rape. He would drug victims and record them. He was known to be active within a certain time range from the timestamps of the videos. He repeated this dozens of times and was only caught after the final victim woke up during the act. Authorities appealed for people to come forward with any more information because they believed there could be more victims than were discovered from the videos.
By cross-referencing the location data from my phone with the date of an event my Last FM profile and the location of his home, I was able to confirm why he looked familiar. This allowed me to contact the authorities and bring the start of the known time frame significantly forward.
(there might be enough information in this post for the perpetrator to be identified - if you do, please keep it to yourself)
Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my location tracking they believed me. I didn't even have to resort to mentioning that I used to work for the TTC as a coop student.
I'm not saying I absolutely love all this surveillance-lite stuff, but in an honest breakdown of the tradeoffs for law abiding people living in real democracies or other trustworthy states I fail to see a huge downside at the present time.
Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc.
Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions.
I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS.
I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.
I've been driving for almost 15 years in the UK, and I've only been stopped once by the Police at a heavily advertised drink-driving checkpost set up during the Christmas season.
Discrimination does happen in the UK, but I don't think there's the same motivation from the Police to arrest people for trivial matters during this sort of campaign.
Certain systems are more efficient if they operate with high trust. The TTC is one of the places where we go with the more efficient option that allows defectors to gain at the cost of others. I actually know someone that is a communist and refuses to pay TTC fare on the basis that he thinks it should be completely socialized. He estimated that the one time he got a ticket paid for only 1/3rd or 1/5th of his total usage.
In other words, defectors are still net-ahead. The system is under-policed.
But the small amount of policing that exists exerts enough social pressure to stop widespread flouting of the rules. I was happy to provide proof that my very-soon-to-be-expiring transfer was from a valid trip.
I'm sorry that you've had a poor interaction with an officer, but I think it's partially a matter of how one treats officers. Even when I've been in the wrong, I did my best to treat them with respect and I quite honestly have been treated well by every police I've dealt with, save one exception when I was pulled over in America. I accept that this happens, and a curt reply and a stiff ticket is not the end of the world and I am happy to have largely lived and traveled in places where the police were civil.
headline: "Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect."
HN discussion about it (March 7, 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511637
Indeed, I believe the first use of the "Right to Privacy" was by a lawyer and Louis Brandeis, and future Supreme Court Justice, upset that a journalist had written that one of them attended a wedding.
Depending on who brings to suit, I expect it's likely that even the conservative justices will suddenly agree with a right to privacy.
Nobody could cheat secretly. They'd still cheat. The framing story in my favourite comic issue "Winter's Tale" has more or less exactly this be scenario, "I was going to tell you" he says. The people in Winter's Tale and most of that run (Gaiman's Golden Age of Miracleman) live in a utopia, but they're still people and they still cheat and lie. The larger point of the story is that children won't fill a hole in your heart.
Your last point is exactly poignant; it'll be lawmakers who end up above the law, above the control. Which makes it more like 1984 than a "borg" utopia.
The solution shouldn't be to make crimes easier to hide. It's to legalize homosexuality.
Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".
And that argument is much, much older than the digital age. If anything, extra tracking helps exonerate more than without it (false imprisonment, etc) https://time.com/wrongly-convicted/
When you are facing wrongful conviction, the assumption is that you are unable to present evidence in an effective manner anyway.
The reality is that data can be used to your benefit or against you. Having more of it doesn't shift the balance one way or another. It just means there's more opportunities to take it one way or the other.
Your times article also makes no mention of location tracking raising exoneration rates. It talks most prominently about how cheap faulty field drug tests contributed significantly to the improper convictions.
I'm also assuming here that you are actively looking to have your location logged -- something most people do not explicitly sign up for before it starts happening for them (usually after it has manifested results, people accept it as some weird fact-of-life).
I am far less likely to initiate a serious crime in Canada than I am to be falsely accused of a serious crime. It is hard to fake exhaust data and saying "I saw him near the John St Starbucks at 9am with a gun" is fakeable just by following someone around. You don't need my Google data to prove it. It's on the CCTV cameras, it's on the cellphone towers my phone is pinging, etc.
I understand this makes people nervous, and I agree that there is something to be nervous about, but when I talk about the practical choice of recording your location data to a provider like Google I don't see much practical downside at the present time.
I created a S60 python script that kept scanning Bluetooth mac addresses and link them with the cell tower I was connected to (no GPS yet on mobiles).Then later processed the logs to see if I encountered the same people in different locations and times.
And yes, I re-encountered a bunch of Bluetooth mac addresses in different locations. For me it was fascinating at that time :)
This was before the Iphone was launched IIRC and I think it only worked with the Nokia N series.
It'll scan for bluetooth trackers in the background (and airpods and iphones) and can give you a per-device history.
> Using the console's background connectivity, a Nintendo 3DS in Sleep Mode can automatically discover other Nintendo 3DS systems within range, establish a connection, and exchange content for mutually played games, all transparently and without requiring any user input.
> For example, in Rhythm Heaven Megamix, if the user passes by someone with the same software, they will take on a figure-fighting duel challenge.
There was a puzzle one where you got a random starting piece, and you could copy one piece from each person you passed that they owned. Sometimes you'd go past someone with the entire puzzle, sometimes you'd already have all the pieces someone else did (which is kind of fun in its own right).
I miss that there's nothing like that on Switch, but it was not great for the battery life.
(actually, on the original DS there was a game called The World Ends With You that implemented this feature at the game level, too. OS-level is a big improvement, but it was still neat there, especially since it gave you a bonus even for passing DSes that didn't hvae the game running)
You'd be amazed at how few women find that exciting
Apart from the final plot twist, this was surprisingly normal when I was a kid in the 1970s. The number of times my sister and I were left sitting outside a pub, either at a picnic table or even waiting in the car while the adults were inside having fun...
I've personally found Google's location history to be a net positive for me. From places I've been whose precise addresses I can't remember (e.g. distant family events), to tracking hospital, doctor visits.
I've even used it as a proxy for timesheets when I used to work from an office on weeks where I wouldn't have recorded my activities well (like which client I visited, how long I took lunch, etc).
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-location-activity/id10...
41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
Most most introverted people tend to do though (myself included), is attending less social events as they become older. But you can still force yourself out there and meet people based on your hobbies.
And who knows, maybe you meet your significant other at one of those events for your favorite hobby?
Many of my neighbors go to church and I'm very jealous at how much social capital it provides every single week for essentially free.
It's such a shame that something so good is wrapped in something so silly.
For instance, replace God and Jesus with the Superego and Id respectively. You'd be surprised at how much sense some quotes make.
But religion is so vague, it's almost mad-lib. And some parts will still be complete nonsense or primitive statecraft memes.
Sharing this with other church-goers might not be well received, also.
However, in contrast, my fiance is from Peru and goes to a Latin Church; there you have a very strong sense of community and can meet plenty of people. Also, you probably won't be meeting your SO at the Church directly but you will most likely be introduced _through_ someone from the community (especially older people who have bigger families).
The other thing about religious communities is that "dating" is not about hookups or casual sex but more about about finding life long partners and marriage. This can be a blessing or a curse depending on what stage of life you are in (though if you are truly devout, you won't mind) so it's not perfect.
Anyway, for non religious people, there are still plenty of ways to meet: Volunteering programs, social clubs, sport centers, etc.
The only advice I would give is meet as many people as possible because chances are your potential partner will be introduced to you through friends of friends eventually.
Of course, this is anecdotal and based on myself and my friends. But just as a counterpoint to your "go to university" advice =)
Most men still need to find a partner through other means like cold approach (terrible - it’s highly dependent on looks just like Tinder) or through warm approach (friends of friends, hobbies, social groups, etc. - this is where most average men meet their partners).
The issue now is the growing number of single men. This number keeps going up every year and it doesn’t look to be improving. It’s definitely leading to some not-so-great side effects. (The number of single women is growing more slowly)
How is this possible, outside of gender imbalance or imbalanced matching (i.e. one man in a relationship with multiple women)?
First, do you have any sources? Most (Western culture) highly-educated women that I know use online dating apps.
Second, as I understand, a major issue about dating with highly-educated people: Women (almost) always want to meet same socio-economic status or above. Dear HN readers: Read that last sentence mathematically: Greater than or equal (>=)! As women are quickly holding more than 50% of highly educated jobs (economically practical masters degrees and above), this creates a huge mismatch. See: Medicine, science, finance, technology jobs. (Commentary: By 2030/40/50, I feel a huge portion of medicine will be women. Great!)
Real-world example: If a man is a public pre-school or elementary school teacher (middle to lower income), his chances to meet a high-income woman are very low in 2022.
On the contrary, many (Western culture) men are happy to meet / date / marry women whom have (far) lower socio-economic status. "Sexy, not smart." In the classic (out-dated) cultural view, this is "big (male) boss" dates/marries low socio-economic status executive assistant ("secretary"). I have observed this is quickly coming to an end in the last twenty years.
Real questions:
(1) Whom are high-income male bosses dating these days? I assume: High-income women whom are breaking the glass ceiling for senior roles. (Great! I support these women 152%!) Or: These men date younger (and younger!). I have observed both in my professional career.
(2) Whom are low-income/-education female executive assistants dating these days? I assume they are mostly single. Why? They want to meet high-income men, but these men are more-and-more focused on other (still rare!) high-income women(!).
Final comment that is very (deeply!) personal: If you are not alpha-male or very high income, it is difficult to meet highly-educated women. Basically, they are "vaccuumed/Hoovered" (sorry: American English slang!) by other high-income/status or alpha men. It is so tough. Please, please, do not read this final paragraph as discriminatory against women whom choose these men. Dating is complex! Personally, my dream is to meet someone who is a science researcher (academic) with a low salary, but passionate about their work. Lots to talk about!
Last: Please, please don't read any of this post as something negative towards women. No, exactly the opposite. I am more interested in how wealthly, highly-educated societies will rebalance when women hold more than 50% of educated positions (very soon in rich countries!). In my view, it is terrific that women finally have equal opportunity in my society. My mother never had these opportunities, but her daughters will finally have the chance for economic equality. Huzzah.
High income women end up marrying their college partners. A lot of these gals meet their partner in college and never separate. That's how I see it for the majority of women I've known in SV. Exceptions being those who didn't go to college and weren't going to pursue a high income profession (or were but bailed on it) but inevitably chose it later.
It's hard to meet these women because they are few in percentage and like most women - they don't go out to meet men. They might use dating apps, they might date a coworker, they might date someone in their social circle. So, you're not likely gonna meet them organically at a hobby or anything.
It's a rough world for men out there.
I have had several relationships where at the time I would have called the person my significant other but in retrospect there have only been 2 that have truly been significant to my life. I met my wife at a bar. A few years after she passed, I met my now girlfriend of 12 years at a farmers market where she was selling pickles and kimchi.
I had a primary care physician in the late 1990s that had been polling his patients on that his whole career, and said that a little more than 80% of his patients met at a bar. So there you go.
I also agree with your assessment on partners, I have had a couple that were important at the time, but looking back, where more like friends with benefits. Only two were really significant. One that tortured me emotionally and basically set me up for over sensitive warning flags for about five years, what a mess. The other one I married over 25 years ago.
He was old, early 80s (since retired and passed on) and said he had been asking his patients that his whole career, and had been keeping track.
I met my wife at a bar. Now, this was pre-smart-phone era, I will grant you that.
He said that a little more than 80% of his patients met their spouse at a bar. He said every time he heard someone say "You need to go to church", "you need to volunteer", or any other thing like that, he would interject that no, you need to go out drinking and carousing with friends. And always with friends. Apparently, out drinking and carousing alone is not nearly as effective.
You will have to accept the word of dead physician from the 1990s on that. Post 2008, the numbers have likely shifted.
But I still recommend drinking and carousing with friends. (That doesn't mean heavy drinking, you don't have to get plastered to carouse)
On a serious note, it does remind me of that time police arrested a man on suspicion of a break-in, because he was riding his bike in the neighborhood at the time and Google recorded it.
On some level alarm bells are going off.
Seriously, they know every time you pick up your phone. Where you shop, how much you spend, if you miss a stop in the highway, if you text your parents happy birthday, if your heart rate increases when you’re around a particular phone. They quite literally may know your gay before you do.
I wish that was pure /s, but the amount of "Ask HN: Google banned me or my business for no obvious reason" is really staggering. (n.b.: Of course I'm talking about the old Google of 2022, not about the glorious overlords that Google since has become; all praises the holy trinity of Android, Google Search and Google Glurp for Glorps! Please don't ban me.)
https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
So did apple:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-makes-mobility-...
Only… they gave that information to government (supposedly post-analysis and anonymized). Regardless the data was quite literally used to “track and trace” then as a mechanism / justification to place you under house arrest.
/tinfoilhat
That could include such authorities, manipulating or interfering with events and lives, more than anybody would think possible or should be legally allowed.
What might be a good example?
Google and other authorities having such access to so much data about individuals, means they can know of relationships, that the interacting individual parties involved don't know about each other. So, if a wife were cheating on her husband, that can be known. A line can be crossed, where information is leaked to the husband, in various ways. This of course is just a "theoretical" example, of many other kinds of possibilities.
Access to private and personal information is its own kind of power, that can be easily abused under many gray areas, and under all kinds of pretexts and weak justifications.
Do people who see ads get ads based on where they've been by the way?
Then we can decide to share histories and see when we ever overlapped or were near each other. For instance - I became close friends with someone this summer but it turns out we were both at the same events across the USA about 8 years ago. It made me wonder where else we had both been and hadn’t really spoken to each other.
I’ve also wanted this to be a live feature as well where you can opt in to share your location and be like, “hey, Jim is just a block away. What a coincidence! Jim is usually 1500 miles from you.” As a way to run into friends you haven’t seen in a while.
Another instance is that I had lost touch with a friend from years back. We had both lived in Seattle for years. I eventually moved to SF and was at an event. I stepped outside a few times to get air and on one of the times I did - I saw this old friend walk by on the street (it’s almost midnight - he was going to go home to sleep with someone). I call out his name and he’s in shock and awe. We decide to hang out for 30 minutes and decided that this was the sign we needed to reconnect.
That happened about 5 years ago and we’ve been very close ever since.
Sometimes I feel like these kinds of things would be cool to have. Or to do a prospectus and see a year ago - “oh interesting - that guy I gave a ride to five years ago was at the same restaurant as me… Huh - I wonder why we didn’t see each other?” The world is much smaller than we realize. I’ve run into people in small rural parking lots of grocery stores in random countries 8,000 miles away from where we both had known each other without any coordination. If I had been even 10s later in my actions - I would’ve never seen them sometimes.
I have a lot of stories like this. Timing is everything!!
The README includes an example of calculating songs you often listen to while walking/driving/using public transit (by combining Google Maps and Spotify data).
After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.
But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
It was really easy to download flyby exports for any activity and do analysis.
I had a script downloading my Strava recordings of my commute and the associated fly-by data and was easily able to figure out all of the people I was seeing on the way to/from work. Since it linked to the activities and included profile pictures and names, you could easily figure out a lot.
If I remember correctly, you could still see fly-bys of other peoples' rides even if your own was private or followers-only.
It was a pretty massive oversight for a company like Strava - and a bit of an eye opener for me about what kind of data I might be leaking by making "harmless" activities like riding my bike into public data.
It always took practice to be good at this, but apps made a lot of people lazy so I'm not sure about trends.
It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.
Building the relationships between two objects is, by far, the most difficult part of the tracking problem. And, this source code definitely does and interesting job to measuring… something. That “something” seems like a worthy metric to look into.
Jerr Thorpe had an app that gave you your power back and tracked your phone info in a way you could have yourself for awhile but it became abandonware and started eating battery life so I took it off my phone. OpenPaths, that was it's name. https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths
It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
This is very sweet. I hope by the time I get married I'm this good at coding, so I too could see all the times my husband almost met me! By then there might be cameras with years of accessible history scattered around the city.
A similar one I'd love to know is what's the furthest apart I've seen the same bird?
On the surface, this article is cute. After that it's a red flag for all of us.
Finally, per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (and others) these minor privacy infringements add up and is used against us.
There's no such thing as no threat.
Put another way, being complacent and complicit not only sells-out your own privacy, it compromises the privacy of all those round you, your (future) offspring, etc.
For what? Convenience?
I already know that the collecting of data isn't passive. I deny that it's being done to be used against me. I also deny any concrete harms for most people on the short to medium term, although the far future is hard to predict.
Given that I deny the likelihood of harm to this data collection, I'm setting a concrete benefit against no drawbacks. Therefore I will continue to use it.
In some camps, a couple of years ago, the book was on a number of "Book of Year" lists. The issue is far less simplistic than you're making it out to be. That fact that you dismiss the risks and dangers is something - funny enough - covered in the book as well.
Leaving this for completeness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
p.s. Not passive, as in the aim is to be proactive (in influencing behavior). There are plenty of other sources that explore how fragile "free will" is, so maybe we can do that some other time? :)
Once you said, "I'm not going to read...to learn new things..." the conversation was over on my end. The line was drawn. But, for the record, there are other here that might be interested in new ideas and new perspectives, and the flaws in their own. It's why I'm here. So for completeness and fairness to others, I played through.
I'm fairly confident you didn't hear an idea I referenced. So to me, it's odd that you perceive someone was trying to argue with you. Why would anyone bother? You're immune to all outside influences, yes?
I think the long-term answer is to have agents that work for you. Maybe a personal AI?
Years ago I boarded an almost empty plane from my country to a country where I had just started to live. The crew let a printed list of the passengers on one of the seats, I took the list and stored it somewhere. Flash forward few years later: I had met a lot of people in that country, inclusive from my own country. And one day, I rediscovered that boarding list I had totally forgotten about, just to find out that I had ended up knowing one of the persons on it.
How I used my new boyfriends tracking location to realize he spends almost all of his free time in one of our local gentlemen clubs!
It is a fun exercise though and pretty cute to do.
Thanks but no thanks
Or looking at your phone...
Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled:
A) they are Google employees B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them
Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.
I do find it cool to have such data to do the kind of analysis as presented in this post, but not cool enough to let others (especially Google) possess this data as well.
When was it the conference was at "that town".
Sure there's other ways to find the information but I don't mind having it tracked. To each his own but I find more value in it than I think I give up.
I live in the UK, but I can go back to May 2014 and see everywhere I went in Florida on a holiday. Every restaurant, theme park, shop etc.
It's a great way to take a trip down memory lane.
I also use it on a day-to-day basis - e.g. if I need to record what hours I worked on a certain day, I can use it to give me an approximate time I went out for lunch.
A guy I worked for long ago was part of a partnership of architects and they split up. One of the other partners was known for never parting amicably and sued him. He claimed they had agreed on something and my client had failed to deliver and thus owed him some large sum. He presented notes he had allegedly taken during the talk they had a few years earlier including date and time and the word of another partner as support, who claimed to have been present.
My client checked his old calendars and just found the word "Copenhagen" for that + the previous day. With a bit of searching and checking, he figured out that he was incredibly lucky: he had been in Copenhagen that day to sail in a regatta, had lots of witnesses and photographs and easily won the case, the other two got into hot water for falsifying documents and giving false statements, though I don't know the outcome.
He was lucky to have had a multi-day thing and putting it into his calendar. Not sure if "Google showed me being far away" would've stood up, but it can certainly be useful to know your location a few years ago.
Location history enabled me to accurately and confidently report the time window when crime occurred to the police.
I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
Of course not.
> I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
Correct.
> As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
That was not the desired outcome. My desired outcome was to make reporting to the police go as smoothly for me as possible which I'd preferably entirely skip if not for the fact that insurer required me to report it.
Talking to the police (or anyone really) is a stressful event for me so any help with establishing what to say was very much appreciated.
On semi-related note my car is at repair shop for 3 months already and I have no idea how much longer will it be because apparently no supplier of catalytic converters is willing to estimate when they'll have a single item for Toyota Auris.
In cases like these, insurance mostly needs a paper trail, and police are very well aware of that, and they won't look for specifics. They'll probably even suggest what to fill in: that's at least my experience.
I feel for your experience though, and I wish you your car back on the road asap.
Other replies so far have actually convinced me that I don't need to reconsider it, as the benefits seem minuscule compared to the price ;)
On a more practical note, I visited a random restaurant in a town I was visiting which turned out to be an amazing place. Didn’t remember the name. A few years later I’m in the same town and would not have found the place if not for the location history.
In general, I obtain a huge amount of value in being able to know what happened in my own past. This can be both for work and for personal reasons. For this, my calendar and Google Timeline are the two tools I use the most.
Most usefulness is in the past 1-2 weeks, and things become less useful over time, right up until they become extremely useful. For example "Oh crap, I lost this thing, the last time I saw it was on this date. What are the possible places I could have lost it? Let's retrace."
It's hard to convey how much things change once you're able to reliably have this information. Your mindset changes. Things you couldn't do before are unlocked.
I would love a better Google Timeline, one whose data I personally own especially. I suspect there will be an explosion of these types of apps at some point once people catch up.
https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1003590025462681600
I'm guessing the same holds true for all the other services.
I do have my location history activated, and so does lots of people around me. I'm neither a Google employee nor am I ignorant that Google tracks me both physically and digitally.
But being able to have a timeline of where I am at times have been both helpful and interesting, so I'm willing to trade that data for the functionality I receive for it.
If you do know of a better solution that gives me the same data but is not Google, please feel free to share it. I haven't found anything like that that completely abuses my battery at the same time and also guarantees to not sell my data.
What? Why? Both parties seemed happy with it and it seems like a cute thought experiment to me.
Also, I respect that you find it ‘cute’. To me this is ‘insecurity’, ‘attachment’ and an indication of a current or future toxic relationship.
There is no wrong or right, people should know that others out there will have a different POV.
How can you infer that? She clearly had access to his location history, it's extremely unlikely that it happened without his consent. This is rather a vibe of two enthusiastic geeks being genuinely curious about analyzing some cool data about themselves, rather than anyone being "overly attached". We can't tell for sure without more details about their relationship, which isn't our business at all, so talking about "big red flags" feels really wrong and paternalistic (which in fact sounds like a big red flag :P).
> Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history?
That's a valid question though.
"My partner kindly agreed to download his data and sent it to me."
Funny how everyone is so oblivious and saying ‘ohhh I find it so cute’
Nevertheless, I think in general, people should learn that some will agree and others will disagree. There is no wrong or right. If some of you find this ‘cute’ and ‘amazing’ that is perfect. You should also understand and respect that some others find this ‘creepy’, ‘disturbing’ and a big ‘red flag’ for insecurity and annoying attachment.