Comment by pookieinc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pookieinc | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting you mark this section of it, this part also stood out to me.

As a longtime Apple iPhone lover, I switched over to Google Nexus 5 around 6-8 months ago and with it, I decided to try and be as open as possible with my data. This means that I opted into allowing Google to read my mail, save my Chrome searches (and start using Chrome), saving my notes in Google Keep, and then regurgitate all that information back to me on my Google dashboard. I thought to myself: "Once the next iPhone comes, I'll determine if I should go back."

At first, it was striking that one day I booked a flight and then about two weeks later, my dashboard mentioned to me that I should leave 40 minutes early for my flight because of a traffic accident. It knew my flight information, when I should leave, and routes to the airport. I followed Google's suggestion and made it to the airport on time, taking an alternate route Google displayed for me. Once I landed, Google updated my dashboard about the currency exchange, surrounding events, restaurant reviews, foreign news, and more... it "knew" I wasn't home anymore, but across the world. It was initially strange, but with more trips and more experiences, I grew to like that Google could give me handy data.

Another strange thing, when reading my mail, it would point out words like "... On Saturday, Sept. 4...", then ask me if I wanted to save it to my calendar. Small touches like this grew on me and kept my life in sync.

Now, having spent many months with the phone and with the release of iPhone 6, I've come at a crossroads in trying to find out how "okay" I am with giving Google my data. I wonder to myself, "how can Google use this data against me" and come up short. There are things I wish to be private and for those things, they are rare and I use the appropriate channels (Incognito Mode, other email accounts, etc.), but those are much more rare than the typical. It does sometimes bother me that ads show my interests, but other times, I've actually found it surprisingly useful and it has led me to learning about other products available.

I suppose for Apple to release this comment, I agree on the one hand and can see their point, but I wonder... Sometimes it's nice to have certain services available to you, if that means giving some information out.

With my iPhone, I've noticed that the device itself will notice things (though perhaps not as much as Google), without necessarily reporting this information back to Apple.

For instance, it does the content recognition and offers to create calendar events for phrases like "tomorrow", "September 18th", and so forth out of my email. Also, it knows where I live and where I work and tells me how long it'll take to drive back and forth (which isn't helpful to me because I walk), but it also notices when I'm spending the night with my girlfriend because it starts telling me how long it'll take to go to her place.

Perhaps for the level of sophistication Google offers, they need to keep your entire life stored in Google's data centers. But the kinds of features you point out, by and large, are more than possible without it. Your iPhone would know when you have a flight booked, because your boarding pass would be right there in Passbook. It would know when and where you land, because it has GPS. Google might have more clever technology for aggregating and displaying that information, but it doesn't inherently require sending all that data to Google's servers, and the fact that they do so is telling.

And now apple has promised not to just give all that information, and access to your phone, to people claiming to be cops without a warrant anymore.

This was such a good read until that last word. Including that last word it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and full of confidence in Apple's protection of my data.

A part of me wonders who in the PR department thought this was a good announcement to make and whether he/she still works at Apple.

I grew to like that Google could give me handy data.

I agree that this is useful; but sometimes I think Google tries a bit too hard to be helpful. For a few months, I visited my girlfriend every Thursday evening (and at other times as well, of course, but Thursday evenings were consistent). After we broke up, my phone would helpfully let me know every Thursday evening how long it would take to drive to her apartment.

Ha! In my case it sometimes insists that I travel to work at random places at not really normal office times. Wish I could tell it I work from home or better yet it figure that out!

There's actually an option for this in the Google Now settings, but I don't have my Nexus anymore so I can't tell you exactly where. Should be something like unchecking "give me recommendations based on where I go" or something. I know you can also set home and work locations manually.

I run into this despite having set my work location manually. Either it's failing to handle identical work and home locations or it ignores the manual settings given enough "evidence".

The aggressive location-of-work detection is something I've run into as well. Last year it took four trips in three months before my phone decided that I worked at the airport.

Air travel is the context of another "overly helpful" issue: The "remind me where I parked" feature doesn't seem to make any attempt to distinguish between modes of transport, with the effect that when I enter the airport terminal after a flight my phone invariably decides that I need to be reminded where "I" parked the plane.

After a few months of frequently working weekends, Google started giving me directions to work on Saturdays when I stayed at home. I very much like the idea behind this kind of prompt but something like this has so much surface area that it's mostly impossible for them to handle every single edge case (like ours).

And each time you swipe it away, it'll ask you if you no longer want to receive directions to this location.

I realize that the reminder might cause unwanted emotion so soon after a breakup, but as long as it's easy to permanently dismiss the reminder, I would guess that the informativeness of the reminders when they were applicable far outweighed the brief heartache. But then again, I generally prefer to be given a stream of relevant information forthrightly and unfiltered, whether from humans or machines. I'll take the convenience even if it comes with the occasional unpleasantness.

But just wait. Someone will be really freaked out when one Thursday Google fails to show him the traffic to the girlfriend's house, then when he gets there, she breaks up with him.

The last bit reminds me of the father who found out his daughter was pregnant via Target's advertising.[0]

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

Same here man, eventually Google learned that I didn't want to do that anymore, but for a while it sucked to see that pop up every couple days.

> "how can Google use this data against me"

I look at it the other way: What do I gain from allowing Google to build this profile of me, including information from potentially multiple accounts, devices, location history, search history and communication history.

Because if Google is offering their services for free to all comers, that data must be valuable to them. And if I can't deduce why the value is what it is, that's far more likely a failure of understanding on my part than any indication of fairness or harmlessness in the exchange. [1]

And to me, all I see is a convenience function I can't rely upon. It can identify flight or meeting information. Maybe (who knows what parser errors exist or will exist as things change). And it can only even try some of the time, as google doesn't have access to every channel by which my itinerary is set and changed (emails to non-Google accounts, phone calls, text messages, verbal communication, etc.)

And if I can't rely upon it, I have to double-check that it is operating off the right information. And at that point, I might as well have explicitly handled the bits Google Now might have gotten right as well.

The rest of your examples are replaceable with client-side data-detection features -- that have been identifying likely dates, addresses, flights, etc and offering convenience functions to simplify dealing with them for some time -- and location-snapshot information [2]. Nothing there requires indexing all my communications and locations across history.

Maybe Google Now can become something that's worth the trade-off. Or maybe Google will offer a (for-pay?) version with guarantees about who has control over what is retained and who has access to it. But, to me, it's not a good deal right now.

And besides all that, I'm personally a pretty private person, so I have a particularly good imagination of the downside risks, even beyond weighing my benefits vs google's benefits.

[1] It's that old saw: "There's a sucker at every table..." Applied to internet services it suggests: If you can't tell why a company with a free service has a massive valuation and a willingness to pay through the nose for users, you literally have no idea what you're trading away by using it. So you better be damn sure you're at least getting something worth the per-user valuation in return.

[2] Yes, it requires some degree of trust or self-deception to believe that there's a difference between a company that states it's collecting your location history and one that claims it doesn't -- as providing snapshots implies the ability to log said snapshots. But such is life. At some point you make peace with the level of paranoia you can handle, or you opt out of society altogether.

One wonders what Google's cost is to run these services, what margin they'd be happy with, and whether people would pay that in exchange for privacy.

Google's latest quarterly website revenue is about US$11B; assuming 500M active users, primitive math gives $88/user/year. Interestingly, that number is right between Google Apps' two paid tiers. However, I'm not sure if adopting paid Google Apps means you've totally escaped the advertising and privacy implications of all of Google's services.

> I wonder to myself, "how can Google use this data against me" and come up short.

You obviously are of no importance to the world. You do not carry any politically weighted message and you are the crossroads to no important information. The best proof I have: Google and those intermediators of Google have no interest in you.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't participate to the privacy of journalists and members of a political party

I think you've mistaken what Apple is saying here. Many of the little touches you mentioned are also part of iOS, and Apple receives much of the same information. The statements provided here clarify how Apple will use, or not use, that information.

This motherly relationship Google has with you is going to turn bad. At some point, you'll be betrayed. The more you rely on Google, the more it's going to hurt you.

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