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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Google Now for a few months now and it has been amazing.

Example 1: One night I was going to a Roots concert and I went through the venue's website on my Google Chrome on my laptop. Then, right around concert time, Google Now alerted me to what subway I should take to get there.

Example 2: I searched for the Phillies score once on my tablet, and now my phone tells me about the score of each game. Again, I never asked.

Example 3: After 2 days, Google Now guessed where I lived/worked and what time I left for work most days. I don't use any check-in services or anything like that it really just guessed. Then it started telling me what time I'd have to leave home/work to get there on time based on the current subway schedule. Exactly what I wanted, never asked.

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Really cool, but am I the only one who finds this creepy as hell?

I've been operating under the assumption that Google (and others) has been building this sort of data up on their users for a while now; I actually appreciate said data being used (visibly) for my benefit for once.

Not really. They (Apple, Google, FB etc.) always had this data. At least they're putting it to good use.

Yes. Your filter bubble won't let you know that anybody else finds it creepy. "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

I'm not trying to be glib, but: so what? Some people will use it, because it will provide value to them. I may be one of them. Kids born today will, if nothing changes, think this stuff is absolutely normal.

Your reaction is a valid one, and I have my limits too, but I think we're beyond the point of merely acknowledging that it's creepy. Please go further: Where is the line? Why? And what are you willing to do about it?

I can't really see Google proper abusing this, as the product is one-to-one the monitoring: commerce. If you accept that, Google Now is just really targeted advertising—a big, NLP-based, bayesian coupon.

It seems like the bigger issue is when malicious parties usurp this data and use it for their own ends. We can look to science-fiction for predictions. Scroogled comes to mind, as well as a (possibly falsely remembered) recent campaign IRL to root out dissidents via internet searches.

And one more scenario: false flag. Since search records are considered evidence, planting this evidence could be all the sway that a jury needs, or even just for defamation purposes.

I think the fear is not of Google, but of making our lives tied to a record-keeper that could potentially have no accountability.

What happens when you perform a one-off search? For example, lets say a friend asks if you know the score to the Yankees game? You really have no interest in baseball, but you do the search anyhow. Should that really influence your Google Now profile?

It does, but you can always remove the team fairly easily.

What, have you got something to hide? :-)

It is creepy as hell, indeed.

Here's one that impressed me: I put on my calendar an appointment for a movie I was going to see w/ the name of the movie. Google Now on that day pulled up a card of the the showtimes and theater info for the theater of the movie that I was seeing. I hadn't put the name of the theater in my appoointment.

Are you sure Google guessed in Example 3? It usually does the "leave now to get there on time" for every event in your calendar (for which it can find some kind of geographical reference, fitting or not).

Yes, if you have location history enabled, it seems to pretty much assume that if you go the same place during the day often enough, it calls it work, and if you spend enough nights at a place, it calls it home.

Google had picked a location for me and called it "work" which was not the exact street address but close enough. I know I didn't ever key in an address and explicitly tell them it was where I work, or else they'd have had the correct address from the get-go.

> ... if you spend enough nights at a place, it calls it home

Finally! We can replace the old cliche where a girl has basically moved in with a guy once she has a toothbrush at his place, by a new one, where she has moved in once her phone calls his place home.

Imagine the heart-breaking scenes when you have to explain to your phone that this is no longer home, but both of you still love it...

Yes, it mines google latitude data for that. Since I left my office job and started running my own business from home. Latitude has been getting very confused about where I work. Last time I checked it thought I worked at the local shopping centre.

Edit: Just checked, it now thinks I work at my kid's school.

You can explicitly tell it where you work FYI: https://latitude.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/dashboard

Thank you! This needs to be much more obvious.

You can also set it from "My Places" in Google Maps.

Your preferred credit card issuer already knows this - if you have a propensity to eat out during the week. It can look at where you are eating most of the days during the week, aggregated over time, to guess which part of town do you work, vs your home (it knows your home address). It can also look at your spend at gas stations over time to see if you own an SUV vs a Car, or whether its a fuel efficient vehicle or not.

Aggregated data from a number of different sources can give a near-complete picture on a customer.

I think Google did guess his home in example 3. It looks like Google Now tries to build a model of where your home is based on your GPS locations during sleeping hours.

The reason I think this is the case is that it kept on updating my "home" while I took a road trip across the East Coast. So when I moved from NYC to D.C. everyday it would tell me the commute to NYC (Home) because I had spent a few days there and Google thought I was based there.

I'm not sure how it figured it out in my case. I turned on the service and a few days later, I noticed it would start alerting me my commute times in the morning and evening. I was looking up something on google maps and it had marked my work and home locations on the map. Kind of creepy, but I'm starting to like it. The way that it anticipates my needs is very helpful.

I work from home but visit my brother's place (in the next city) fairly often. I wonder if Google Now would think I work there. If so, I wonder if there's a way to tell it what's really going on.

I did that a while [two-city] - seems to keep a separate home/work per city.

Also the home/work thing shows up in Google's information about you on Latitude - so you can approve/edit/delete - see http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/27740/android-setup-your-home...

It thinks I work at my kids' school :)

Example 3 is very disconcerting from a privacy standpoint.

Mine asked me if it was okay, and I know exactly where to turn it off. It also saw I visit friends at a regular schedule every week, asked if it could remember it, and gives me traffic time estimates to there around the time I need to go, and earlier if traffic is heavy.

I think they require explicit user consent.

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