Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having? Or is this a feature chasing after fears of the bogeyman, leading to concrete inconveniences like this?
Massive in London.
My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
51–60 of 366 posts
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#52Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do. Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train…
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Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#53Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do. Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train…
Fwiw I have a pixel and run a lot. It's never happened to me.
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#54[deleted]
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#55Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do. Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train…
I remember Google maps working well for walking around in Europe. Ever since I've moved to America, not so much. Go figure...
Google isn't making arbitrary decisions here - it's reflecting social norms. Americans aren't big on walking. I've seen pictures of beautiful leafy suburbs that don't even have sidewalks.
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#56Is "snatching a phone and running off" a common enough problem in some regions that this is worth having? Or is this a feature chasing after fears of the bogeyman, leading to concrete inconveniences like this?
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Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#57Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do. Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train…
A lot of tech is overfit to the product manager role in tech companies. One of the side effects of living in a bubble.
My Apple Watch is set up by default to assume any 15-minute walk is a "workout" and interrupt me to ask if I wanted to record it. No, I'm just going to the store, what is this "workout" nonsense. My Oura Ring was worse, it would assume any walk duration is noteworthy and my timeline would be a jumbled mess of "workouts". But these would be reasonable assumptions for a mostly sedentary office worker living in the suburbs.
I remember when a Google feature was announced long ago, some of the headlining features was plane ticket support and currency conversion. The average American gets on a plane once a year, to a place where they accept American dollars, and wouldn't ever care about these features. But these are important if you're in your 30s and travel is an important part of your life for either business or vacations.
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#58Adding “running” to the list of things that Google engineers apparently don’t do. Where it joins “walking”. Google Maps will suggest almost arbitrarily bonkers public transport directions to avoid walking. Personal favourite: the sensible way to get from my house to work, unless the weather is terrible, is six minutes on a train and a 15 min walk. Google Maps would, generally, prefer that I spend 15 mins on the train…
Google's mapper has an option for whether to minimize walking. Turned on, it will do things like this, prioritizing the route with the least walking. it would be quite willing to do this sort of thing. Turned off, it will prioritize based on arrival time.
There is a maximum walking distance, I don't know the limit but it's certainly more than 10 minutes. I have never managed to trigger it other than by asking for a route to a location miles beyond any transit options. And it did provide me a route across the Grand Canyon. (Most people are not doing a rim-to-rim in a single day.) (But then it was totally bonkers--offered me a bike route with a time that was preposterous. Looking at it--tiny portion by bike, then walk your bike--the standard rim-to-rim route. But it assumed bicycle speed. No--try that, you're going over.)
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Given this was CBC, my jaw hit the floor when I saw London. I live 20 mins from London, Ontario and 70k thefts in a year would be _insane_. Then I realized it was about London, U.K. and my jaw only hit the table. 70k is still insane, though.
Is it really insane? That is less than 200 per day, in a city of 15 million people.. a single gang of 20 thieves could likely manage that! The real question is, how does this compare to other cities of this size and demographics?
Why compare demographics?
Re: My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's still a fairly lucrative parts stripping market and there are extreme efforts that are used to "unlock" locked devices - it has been known in the Chinese marketplace that you could get paired chips to do SMD rework with a "clean" set of identifiers. they'll swap the SOC, the flash, and the wireless all for a few bucks. older iOS devices as well are also vulnerable to having their syscfg rewritten via exploits…
On top of that a sizable percentage of theft victims don't even bother to report it stolen.
You can't activate the hardware with a different ID regardless. It requires the owner to relinquish ownership.
I'm sure this is different with different components of course depending on how granularly apple tracks their hardware—but the whole package certainly can't be activated.