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How fateful?

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Re: How fateful?

#51

Post by andrewinardeer »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #44
capableweb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any social gathering is a place where you can meet your significant others, university is not the exclusive place for that. 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…

Church is really the classical place. It's a shame there's not a similar place for large groups of secular people to gather once a week for social events.

Sporting events fit that bill. As long as the other is going for the same team I would think.

Re: How fateful?

#52

Post by netsharc »

nevi-me wrote: post #35

This is a great use of one's location data. 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, h…

It has a flaw though, if establishments change names, your record of the visit also changes. If you had lunch at a burger place 2 years ago, and the place closed down and a hair salon opened up in its place, you'd "look back" and Google would tell you you went to a hair salon 2 years ago.

Re: How fateful?

#53

Post by vivegi »

I loved the personal story of two people trying to figure out past history based on data. But the fact that his comes from centralized datamines maintained by bigtech is unsettling.

Re: How fateful?

#54

Post by victornomad »

Many years ago, when everybody had Nokias with the Bluetooth on, I used to do a similar thing.

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 :)

Re: How fateful?

#55

Post by seba_dos1 »

slig wrote: post #47
seba_dos1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The data is being tracked either way. You can only choose if you want to see it or not.

I'm not running any services that would report this data back to Google on my devices. I'm aware that it can still collect some data on me based on my browsing and how I connect to a couple of their services I still happen to use, but I'm fairly certain that it's nowhere near the fidelity of what location history would give them and I prefer it to stay this way.

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 ;)

Re: How fateful?

#56

Post by texasbigdata »

There’s a play about this, the name escapes me, but it’s a “quantum” love story: two people meet and at each step options present; the catch is the possibility tree doesn’t converge (one character had a midlife disease, which only happened in some of the branches).

It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.

Re: How fateful?

#57

Post by smallerfish »

lynguist wrote: post #31

My takeaway is this: If you want to meet your significant other, attend a university. After university your chances will dwindle down as you won't frequent that big come together place any more.

Romantic relationships formed in your early 20s are statistically unlikely to last. University is a fine place to meet people and have fun, but don't count on it as a place to find "your" significant other.

Re: How fateful?

#58

Post by Location-Data »

I was reluctant to mention this kind of story in such a sweet context but a few comments have already touched on privacy, so I want to add my two cents.

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)

Re: How fateful?

#59

Post by texasbigdata »

lettergram wrote: post #46
seba_dos1 wrote: post #10

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

Google literally did this during the pandemic 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.

Ehh, there was some really sketch things there. I think at least for apple they might have potentially already built it and this just moved their announcement date up. There’s a very weird simultaneously timed NSA bill in congress at the same time.

/tinfoilhat

Re: How fateful?

#60

Post by vonwoodson »

This is interesting, if only for the fact that track data did not show a correlation between these two people. 40-ish near misses over a few years would never have made me think that these two tracks were related in any way… then an external force brought them together. I’d like to see how their tracks look now; that is to say A) here’s the tracks of people livi my similar lives w/o a relationship B) here’s the tracks of two people who share a relationship (And eventually, not wishing for anything) C) here’s the tracks of two people who no longer share a relationship, but once did

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.

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