My spouse and I passed each other all the time because we lived in the same neighborhood. I almost had the courage to approach her. Ironically, we ended up meeting through a dating website!
How fateful?
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Re: How fateful?
#72This is beautiful! I've often had the same thought when meeting new people—"What's the closest we've been before now?", "Have we looked at each other as strangers before?", etc.
A similar one I'd love to know is what's the furthest apart I've seen the same bird?
Re: How fateful?
#73Earlier 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.
To me this is an amazing tool to extract lost memories. I look at random tracks in history sometimes, and it’s surprising how much can you remember from that day that you would never remember otherwise.
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.
Re: How fateful?
#74> I'm glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats.
41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
Re: How fateful?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, they can do a lot more since they have data on more than two people.
They know when your sleeping, they know when your awake. They know when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! 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.
What is their current definition of "be good" so that I can comply? Is there any changelog? Perhaps some future plan introducing new parts of "good" and deprecating some as well?
Re: How fateful?
#76> It makes me feel very philosophical. Likely we had walked past each other every other week for three years with our heads down, or in the clouds, paying very little notice to the people around us. Past Channon had not the foggiest clue what impact an unnoticed stranger would come to have on her. Since learning this I can’t help but look at the passers-by in my day-to-day life in a different light. And no shame in g…
Legend has it that Adam Smith (the "father of capitalism") and James
Watt (pioneering steam-engineer and industrial machinist) shared
proximate offices at Glasgow University and drank in the same nearby
pubs. Apparently, no significant record of their connection exists.
Re: How fateful?
#77Fun fact: whatever you can do with this data, Google can do as well!
While she likely got permission, having your girlfriend request all your location data is a bit like Zuckerberg requeating all your location data. On some level alarm bells are going off.
Is it? My girlfriend is probably the only person I'd be comfortable with sharing my location data with, given a reasonable purpose (the one in this post would be good).
Re: How fateful?
#78Fun fact: whatever you can do with this data, Google can do as well!
We get it, Google has access to the data you share with them, shocking.
Re: How fateful?
#79I 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 seria…
I took the pragmatic approach and said to myself "look, if Google really wants to know where I am the only way to avoid it is to go into the woods without my phone, so why not?"
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.
Re: How fateful?
#80Kinda creepy how you have access to your partner's google maps history and you go through it. But hey, if he is happy with it