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How fateful?

chan.co.za

21–30 of 343 posts

Re: How fateful?

#21

Fun fact: whatever you can do with this data, Google can do as well!

Hey wait a second, that's not fun at all, that's incredibly depressing!

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.

Re: How fateful?

#23
how i met your mother, hands down the best tv show ever,,,,,,, did this before location tracking was a thing...... "the best burger in NY", a classic

Re: How fateful?

#25

These are amazing ETL skills, but a big red flag, I thought I was watching the revival of the infamous Overly Attached Girlfriend. As someone said there, this is great and scary at the same time. 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 tr…

Google timeline may not be useful to you but it’s an incredible tool to record your own past. Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.

I don't think I have ever in my life thought "I wish I had location history turned on so I could check where I was at that date". Could you share some examples of how can it be useful?

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.

Re: How fateful?

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I periodically experiment with location history. I currently have it enabled to be able to see my own history and I also record it locally with a third-party app that saves it to my phone. I've compared the location data and looked for patterns or anything at all interesting. I've also thought about building an app to basically give you the same functionality as Google's location history while keeping all the data ou…

Which third party app? I would love to know who has a good implementation of it (with appropriate detection of venues).

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The third-party app only records my GPS coordinates and I process the data myself. Unfortunately, there isn't anything yet that has any of the functionality of Google's location history.

Re: How fateful?

#27

These are amazing ETL skills, but a big red flag, I thought I was watching the revival of the infamous Overly Attached Girlfriend. As someone said there, this is great and scary at the same time. 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 tr…

Google timeline may not be useful to you but it’s an incredible tool to record your own past. Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.

Same here, I believe that I get more value from this data than Google does. I'm sure someone at X (insert any service that has a lot of data I've generated) has done something that I wouldn't be ok with with someones data. But as Scott Hanselman has said; "Microsoft isn’t nearly as organized as it’d need to be to be as evil as you think it is."

https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1003590025462681600

I'm guessing the same holds true for all the other services.

Re: How fateful?

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google timeline may not be useful to you but it’s an incredible tool to record your own past. Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.

I don't think I have ever in my life thought "I wish I had location history turned on so I could check where I was at that date". Could you share some examples of how can it be useful? 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 the last time (at the beginning of the pandemic) that I went in to the office.

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.

Re: How fateful?

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google timeline may not be useful to you but it’s an incredible tool to record your own past. Believe me, I care far more than google in my ability to know where I was on April 24 2016.

I don't think I have ever in my life thought "I wish I had location history turned on so I could check where I was at that date". Could you share some examples of how can it be useful? 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.

It's great to be able to answer questions like "when did we go on that trip to X" or "how long has it been since we went to Y".

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.

Re: How fateful?

#30
And this friends is why "third party" entities collecting your meta data and such is a concern. A lot (read: enough) can be learned about you *and who you associate* without actually listening to your calls, etc.

On the surface, this article is cute. After that it's a red flag for all of us.

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