Plot Twist:
When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting.
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
Don't worry, knowing google they would build this just so someone could get their cushy promotion, then the whole thing will be abandoned within 1 to 2 years max. Corporate dystopia falls apart when met with the apathy at google, no problem.
There's no promos in maintaining the dystopian nightmare program so it will be replaced by new dystopian nightmare programs that do the same thing but worse every 2-3 years. Eventually, enough dystopian nightmare programs will be running in parallel that they will actually create a utopia due to unexpected interactions between the dystopian nightmare programs.
It gets worse; to keep people in the workforce they can do the opposite, steer compatible people away from each other during the optimal reproductive window.
"And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job." – Marshall Brain, "Manna" (2007) <https://marshallbrain.com/manna1>
This is like maybe the least dystopic use of advertising data Google could go for! It just has the vibe of dystopia, but ultimately if you hit it off with someone Google didn't influence you, they just made a correct prediction. Compared to advertising to influence you to spend money it's nothing.
Not really, if "it" goes into a non-reproductive location. No fancy technology required. It's not like such things were unknown, even in ancient times.
There was a case where someone was getting ads for pregnancy products before she herself even knew she was pregnant, iirc it was down to search queries but don't quote me on that (or that the story is actually true).
It was the woman knew she was pregnant, but her father did not, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the algorithm knowing she was pregnant when she did not know.
The author chose to use google tech and let it capture everything. She chose to. She let it happen. If you don't want that, you can choose not to like I do. But the great majority of you will choose (by omission) because it's easier, then complain about it. Every time you'll do what's easy, and encourage the surveillance society you pretend to despise.
It's a funny "joke" but for a large percentage of people, their college decision and entrance exams were the determining factor in who they married; where you put yourself has a huge effect on whom you meet.
Going to an engineering college where the demographic was 99% male, I guess I was determined to finish alone ;). But honestly 100% agreed with your point, even with online dating, a lot of people end up dating people they know or people they meet through a common friend.
It's funny how predictive that is. There was a woman in the dorm we'd lived in -- we were definitely not friends but knew each other. A few years after graduation we ran into each other at a party on the opposite coast...and ended up together for a few years.
I mean I moved out of my hometown with that - meeting people - as an additional objective. It didn't work relationship wise (I ended up with someone I met online over a shared hobby / community), but it was an interesting experiment I guess. I like to think I ended up a bit more worldly, a bit more resilient to social situations and dealing with people very different from me personality wise.
And ironically, if you met your partner on a dating app in a large city or metro area, your dating encounters were ostensibly under direct influence by a tech company’s algorithm, yet you were likely in a pool vastly larger than a college campus.
The thing is if it's not the college decision it'll be something equally as random and trivial. 99% of what we do is just bumping atoms against atoms in a soup of probability.
Somewhat related, I had high hopes for Facebook Dating to be a great product and a dating site/app disruptor. FB has all that data, why not use it to play matchmaker? Unfortunately, like many other Facebook ventures, it's nothing as expected, and is just a "Here's people in your area. Kind of. Sometimes."
Facebook once started showing me a whole lot of updates from one particular friend-of-friend for a few weeks, to the point that I wondered if it was trying to hook us up.
They probably aren't allowed to use that data. Something something privacy. And imagine the uproar from privacy fear mongerers if Facebook tried to make such a product.
That is why we can't explore things that we "might" consider nice. A product that might have been.
There is nothing wrong with using whatever data for matching as long as it is specified in the terms the user agrees to by signing up for Facebook Dating. Privacy laws prevent you from using data for other purposes or selling it to third parties.
Most likely they tried this and realised the results are biased. Imagine what data Facebook has about you, they know you live in X1 city, have visited X2 & X3 places recently, have attended X4 & X5 events, have interacted with X6 & X7 pages. Then if they try and match you with other people who have similar profiles, we get headlines such as "Facebook Dating only matches <insert minority> people with other <insert minority> people" as it's biases on hyper-local location.
Using other data such as "Person A likes band Y, we will only match them with other people who like that band too!" doesn't really make sense, as that isn't a requirement to have a good relationship... Unless by liking a band page, you really mean "I religiously go to every concert and could not date a person who does not also do that". So they might as well just do the same as Tinder / Bumble / etc and show anyone within X miles of your location.
The only advantage they really have is your friends circle, so they could use that to suggest friends of friends (of friends?), but I imagine that would quickly be exhausted if they only displayed matches from that.
Tangentially: I've read a sci-fi short story in some anthology in the past 10ish years, from the perspective of an AI that gains sentience, hides its existence, but uses its powers for good to nudge people in better directions. Things like timing when push notifications arrive on their phones or what gets highlighted in their newsfeeds - small interventions in their digital lives.
I have no idea the name of the story or its author but it was a nice hopeful take where machine intelligence doesn't decide to enslave or destroy humanity.
Unfortunately, the real life version is likely to be a corrupt hidden group or organization who have placed themselves above or are circumventing the law, that uses AI and their power to do damage to the lives of others.
Meanwhile, Facebook matches people to those they're unattracted to, despite having all the attraction data. Except for the occasional moment that someone reads a WhatsApp story from someone they haven't seen in years, and then FB spams their feed with each other.
Excellent scenario. Except that a lot of the "algorithmic nudging", can be unethically intended by the creators of the algorithm or specifically tweaked/ overridden by humans in the chain to give the results they wanted.
After all, "who" is in charge or has access to the data? Maybe even an unknown individual or group, with their own agenda, and outside of Google's stated corporate goals or awareness.
I've had in my mind an idea for a short story based on this idea. YouTube starts putting a particular band on their "watch next" list, then the band schedules a gig in town, ensuring that they both think "Wow, I have to go!"
That's pretty disturbing, and not too far beyond capabilities.
I think the biggest one missing would be that iirc a date going well seems pretty much random in dating service data, despite a fair bit of effort to find correlations.
Wait, wait... Throw in Google Maps re-routing and you have a dystopian movie.
(It is talked about that Google Map re-routes to odd paths to check if the path is still open.)
Ohh my poor Cassandra. Prophecy and foresight are so cheap. Everyone
already knows where we are heading, even those in the deepest
denial. The Gods only stipulated that nobody would believe you. For
what is to be done, belief is maybe not so important.
10 years from now I live in a farming community, most of you have cel phones in your heads and live in panopticon minority-report smart cities pre-policed by AI, many of your relatives live in a bed, and every last one of us believes in God.
And now to scramble the pw to this account as well. That's it for me. No more socks left.
> 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 getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he. In meeting at the right time, stars are aligned, it was the right time to intersect. Or perhaps a host of other reasons. There may have been better times, perhaps bounded for this success quite close to or at the time you didn 'meet'. And who knows what other 'success' could have worked out - collaborators in something, getting together when 're meeting' - we don't know, an individual's life's not repeatable, and that in itself is beautiful.
It is indeed fascinating mapping and wondering, and probably applicable to a lot. But not to downplay the philosophical side, as that's important, and important the OP included it.
I don't really agree, if you sat down and talked with every single person you walked by throughout the day you would meet many people you clicked with, both on a friendship and romantic level. If the author was that outgoing they probably would have met their partner earlier, or she would have found someone she liked better.
In other words I don't think who we end up with is some 1 in a million cosmic star aligning moment, it's probably more like 1 in 100 and many people would be as good or a better fit than who we end up with. The time you spend with your person is more important than some intrinsic value you both bring at the start.
Your love is one in a million
You couldn't buy it at any price
But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine hundred thousand other possible loves
Statistically some of them would be equally nice
Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you
Or dumber, but better at sport or... fuckin' tracing?
I'm just saying
I really think that I would, probably
Have somebody else
If I didn't have you
Someone else would do
The 1 in 100 is what keeps my wife busy with family law. The odds of ending up marrying someone vs having a healthy relationship are 2 very different things.
My wife and I dated through undergrad, broke up at "get married or break up." And ended coming back together as adults with more life and relationship experience. Based on plans, we never should have been back in the same city. And when we started hanging out again, neither expected a relationship, just a friendship still being sick of each others' sh. But we had both grown up. We're 24 years into our relationship now. I think it's going well.
That's all purely anecdotal, though.
I don't think real math could be done with this. Success isn't measurable. People often split due to $ or tragedy. People stick it out, miserable the entire time. It walks into Aristotle's eudaimonia. You can't know until it's over. Even then, quantifying quality is folly.
I'm guessing your wife is a divorce attorney? If so, knowing what she knows, what's stopping her dropping out of the marriage and taking half your stuff? Even in a perfect marriage, there's always the incentive.
No, she does general practice. That includes family law, but not dedicated.
It would be an equitable portion of our collective stuff, not 1/2 of mine. There is no “yours” when you’re married. That’s a big part of what marriage means. Even pre-modern and across many cultures, marriage has been viewed as a contract.
Money (or lack thereof) is one of the primary motivators in her experience. A lot of “rich people” get divorces when they’re in debt up to their eyeballs and the consequences hit.
We’re not struggling, not wealthy, and are pretty equally valued. Also, there’s more than stuff. The burden of children, a household, and even our own lives would be much greater solo. We’re a pretty great support system for each other.
There is no perfect marriage. Part of my point. I think mine’s great. We’ll see when we’re dead or divorced.
A "good marriage" isn't guaranteed to be a desirable one past the wedding day. I am in no way suggesting GP's marriage is a ticking time bomb, but I've read enough stories on Reddit and elsewhere to know there's no such thing as a guaranteed marriage even if you do everything right. My expectation is that GP's or his spouse might possess insight.
People who's marriages I thought would go on till death (Bezos's, Gates's, Carmack's, and most recently Tom Brady's) can have the scales tipped into the direction of "leave for reason X and take what you can from him (and sometimes her) on the way out", whether out of vindictiveness or perceived entitlement, even if the money wasn't the primary cause or objective.
I think that's a common misunderstanding about who owns what in a marriage. I'll quote Matt Levine on this:
One thing that I find a little weird about the Bezos divorce is that there are a lot of claims that it will make MacKenzie Bezos “the world’s richest woman.” I suppose there is a technical sense in which that is right, but it assumes not only that she will have a right to half of Jeff Bezos’s assets in divorce, but also that she has no such right in marriage. That strikes me as a strange way to think about marriage, and about the “community property” laws that might give her half the assets in divorce. (Surely those laws imply that she is in a sense a joint owner now?) I would have thought the more straightforward analysis is that she is the world’s richest woman now, because she is a member of a married couple that has more money than any other single person or married couple on the planet, but I guess that is not how the scorekeeping works.
This concept of marital property is speculative, if not fictional, unless both Jeff and Mackenzie made explicit agreements to co-own the shares during their marriage. Prior to their divorce, if Jeff wanted to dump all his Amazon stock, I doubt he needed MacKenzie's permission to do it. If he were deposed by the SEC over alleged claims of market manipulation with Amazon stock, Mackenzie would not be the one held liable. While she may have been able to influence his purchases/selloffs as one half of the world's now-formerly richest couple, she never had ownership of the stock as a legally-recognized property right in itself (and the liabilities the may come with such ownership). She now has such a right (although I would argue that she shouldn't) as a divorcée.
> I would argue this concept of marital property is a fiction
Property is a social construct; marital property no more or less than any other, and likewise no more or less a fiction.
> . Prior to their divorce, if Jeff wanted to dump all his Amazon stock, I doubt he needed MacKenzie's permission to do it.
Yes, marriage is exactly like a general partnership in that, absent explicit agreement or special legal treatment of particular property, any partner can dispose of property of the partnership.
Also, like a general partnership in that the property legally ascribed to the partnership rather than partners individually is divided among the partners as personal property at dissolution.
> Yes, marriage is exactly like a general partnership in that, absent explicit agreement or special legal treatment of particular property, any partner can dispose of property of the partnership.
So pre-divorce MacKenzie could have unilaterally decided to dump Jeff's Amazon shares on the market without his permission?
She could have burnt down Bezos's Medina home to bits and he couldn't sue for damages, even if he payed for the construction, property taxes, other bills, and was sole owner of the deed?
She could have access to any separate bank accounts he owned, and blown it all?
> Also, like a general partnership in that the property legally ascribed to the partnership rather than partners individually is divided among the partners as personal property at dissolution.
A partnership in and of itself doesn't create any obligations other than the acknowledgement of said partnership. There isn't a presumption of combined ownership. A partnership is the explicit creation of a contract that both parties agree to. If a contract is voided, one is no longer required to perform any duties or continue providing resources.
In a marriage, the terms are set by the state and there is a presumption of combined ownership. Even if a prenup to the effect of "I keep what I earned, you keep what you earned" exists, a judge can ignore it.
> A partnership is the explicit creation of a contract that both parties agree to.
So is a marriage. In both cases, there are default consequences in law that apply in the absence of contrary explicit agreement, particularly (relevant to thr current issue) as regards property attributable to the relationship, including which property that is.
> If a contract is voided
That’s not relevant, here. Voiding a contract is cancellation, due to a legal defect that makes it categorically invalid (if completely prohibited) or voidable at the discretion of a party (such as when one party was a child when making it); the marital case of voiding a contract is annulment, not divorce.
Divorce is termination of a contract, not voiding.
> In both cases, there are default consequences in law that apply in the absence of contrary explicit agreement, particularly (relevant to thr current issue) as regards property attributable to the relationship, including which property that is.
I'm aware of that and seeing as the Bezos's marriage did not have a pre-nup, Jeff was relatively fortunate. But my concern is with how marriages are treated as legal institutions apart from how commercial contracts are upheld.
In a partnership, two private parties can create a contract by themselves. The state is not involved in the creation of a contract. The state will only involve itself with the contract's enforcement or the resolution of any suits arising from its dissolution. The state works within the body of laws it's upheld, but almost all rights stated in the contract supersede the default assumptions held by the state.
When it comes to marriage, the state (via the court) is deemed its creator, enforcer, and dissolver. A divorce can only be granted under the acceptance of the state's terms. A judge can decide to ignore precedent or the upholding of a pre-nup.
Many who are / have been in bad marriages complain loudly about it. The many in good marriages rarely talk about it ("bragging").
Thus, take such stories online with a grain of salt. Especially since many are blind to their own faults, and therefore can't include them in their stories.
There are many good marriages in which at least one spouse brags about a happy (however that's defined) life of 20+ years and many bad marriages that aren't evident as such until the inevitable "he/she left me and I don't know why" post on Reddit.
I agree that it is important to take a person's examination of his/her self or his/her (ex-)spouse with a grain of salt. And while people are blind to their own faults, you're making the mistake of thinking that divorces are based on falsifiable and rational assessments. Some are. Some aren't. But one isn't likely know the true reason a long time after the fact, if at all.
> I don't think who we end up with is some 1 in a million cosmic star aligning moment, it's probably more like 1 in 100
I suspect that you're right for most people, but those odds will be better or worse depending on the person and their circumstance. For some people, it probably is closer to 1 in a million, or could even be worse. Some go their entire lives meeting people and never finding one. There's probably not much harm in feeling a bit lucky to have found your person, especially if you suspect at least one of your odds were worse than most.
Exactly. Many people don't realize, that the more people you are interacting with, the greater the odds are to finding what you seek. Probably this is more true for men, as oppose to women, as men tend to be more proactive. However, men still need to overcome any shyness or fear of rejection, to unlock such greater possibilities.
I actually think that your comment is probably saying something similar to the above. It potentially is about 1 in 100 as you state, but the timing of it makes it far less likely for 1 in 100 to work out because both people may not actually be mentally or emotionally ready to settle into a monogamous relationship. At least, my own experience has led me to that sort of a worldview.
I've had relationships not work out for varying reasons, including going on vacation 'at the wrong time', or someone's ex visiting the city and making her feel like she can't 'move on' at the moment, stuff like that.
And I went through my own dating phase in which I was less mature and not ready to settle down with many of the people I met. Quite a few of them were perfectly great women with whom I likely could have lasted in a long-term relationship (of course, we can never really know). As I see it, the timing wasn't right, either for me (mostly for me) or for them. It was only after a few years of this that I was in the right mindset to stay with the person I happened to be dating at the time. Sure, that probably doesn't sound great, and I probably won't discuss this at length with my wife, but it's the way I view the world. I'd wager that something like 80% of the people I went on more than three dates with were 'compatible' enough that I'd pursue a relationship with them, but it only worked out long-term with the last one because we were both in the same mindset to give an earnest effort at making our relationship work at the same place and same time.
So, using dumb analogy math, 1/X (compatible person) chance times 1/Y (right timing, maturity, life experience, etc.), it works out to a lower probability 1/(X*Y).
When I and my wife met for the first time we were both tourists, we both had never been to that country before (and none of us had ever been to a place the other had been), and we had exactly one day of overlap at this place and just happened to have decided to go to a particular spot at the same time in the early morning. And it's extremely likely that there would never have been another opportunity at any time later.
A bit unlikely as I got married quite late in life! (And I had zero intentions of getting involved with anyone up to then) (In any case - this was a comment to a discussion about crossing paths with one's SO/partner at other times than when actually meeting - not about meeting someone else. My story was just one where it's guaranteed that we couldn't have crossed paths before - no googling necessary..)
>Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he.
Man this is really key. relationships is a skill. I don't believe in soul mates, but rather a healthy relationship is developed when two people have honed the skill enough to be able to handle conflict without causing irreparable harm, and enjoy each other out of conflict.
It helps immensely to have common goals and wants.
My wife and I were very aligned, right from early on, concerning financial disposition and family goals. We got that right out in the open early. We completely merged our financial lives and closed on a house, both names on the deed, both names on the mortgage, a year before we got engaged. When we got engaged, we couldn't afford an engagement ring, joint decision on that, and one of her friends got up in my face about it, 'where is the commitment?'. My dear fiancee held her ring finger up against the house and said "this is the commitment".
That common ground, those common goals, has made everything that followed much easier. Thirty years this past Spring.
My husband and I are pretty sure we must have been in the same room at university on various occasions (we knew lots of people in common) but didn't meet until several years after we both left. I'm three years older and was four academic years ahead so think it is a good thing we didn't meet then - I don't think as a PhD student that I would have dated a first-year undergraduate!
> And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he
This is a really good point. My wife and I often laugh about how in high school especially and college too we wouldn’t likely have been friends, much less good romantic partners. Both of us then were different people yet now both of us are perfect for each other.
That idea has always fascinated me as well — imagining each of us tracing out some kind of space-time path on a map. And with other's paths crossing ours. I want to be able to rewind time and watch the paths of ex-girlfriends I have lost touch with to see if we crossed paths again, perhaps in an airport, unaware of each other.
Perhaps it would all be more depressing than that though, exposing the small, repetitive worlds we live in. For my part, I have tried to road-trip, travel more often than others in my family have done, tried too to expose my kids to travel when growing up so they can experience a slightly bigger loop across the face of this small planet.
I’ve heard that there’s something like a 50% that someone you know is at the airport at the same time you are - because people who fly know people who fly.
> imagining each of us tracing out some kind of space-time path on a map...
Very fascinating indeed. Imagine all the near-misses, as well. Like you were in the exact location of a childhood sweetheart, soon-to-be girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, but separated by 30 minutes. Perhaps, if had waited 30 minutes later, would have ran into a dream woman, who would have been the perfect wife.
I was getting philosophical the other day for the opposite reason, looking at all the things that went slightly different than they would have been expected to go, or that I had previously wished had not gone "wrong," but if they had happened the "right" way, we never would have met.
I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!
Think of all the causal paths since the beginning of the universe that led to your birth. Even the smallest difference would have resulted in what you are now being a different person, if you existed at all. Just one atom in a supernova explosion billions of years ago having a slightly different trajectory ...
With all due respect, we don't know that. Knowing this as a fact would mean provably demonstrating the degree of instability at any instant of the universe, essentially its whole trajectory in a potentially infinite (and at least incredibly high) dimensional space.
It's just as possible that for a given person, molecules could have changed somewhere or even "bigger" events could have happened one or more times, and their existence would have remained. Automatically assuming a chaos of infinite possibilities with completely divergent universe is potentially reducing the complexity of the world and its countless smaller stabilizing feedback loops that locally do reduce divergences. Otherwise we'd never do anything for fear of spontaneously exploding or other funny things.
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.
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)
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.
I'm sure people have opposite stories where instead of a quick dismissal they received attitude, general harassment, or escalation.
Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc.
Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions.
I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS.
I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.
When I stopped driving in the United States, I noticed a sharp drop in interaction with the police. Years would go by with zero interaction. In a car: A few times a year (or month if unlucky). All of those automobile-related interactions are an opportunity for you to make a small mistake that will be blown up by the officer.
It seems like the US has a real problem with this.
I've been driving for almost 15 years in the UK, and I've only been stopped once by the Police at a heavily advertised drink-driving checkpost set up during the Christmas season.
I recall a road trip with my father (this is at least 30 years ago), where we went to see my grandfather a few states away. As we drove through some small rural town, we were tailed by the local police for quite some time until we hit the county line and they simply turned around -- my dad told me at the time that they must have been following us to see if they could find a reason to pull us over. As I grew up, and started driving myself, I believe that to have been the case. Quotas for tickets and arrests are definitely a problem in the US.
Real question / No trolling: How do you feel about "holiday season" motor car stops? On the surface, it sounds great (reduce drink-driving), until you are an ethnic minority and the police person is discriminatory. Thoughts?
Discrimination does happen in the UK, but I don't think there's the same motivation from the Police to arrest people for trivial matters during this sort of campaign.
Certain systems are more efficient if they operate with high trust. The TTC is one of the places where we go with the more efficient option that allows defectors to gain at the cost of others. I actually know someone that is a communist and refuses to pay TTC fare on the basis that he thinks it should be completely socialized. He estimated that the one time he got a ticket paid for only 1/3rd or 1/5th of his total usage.
In other words, defectors are still net-ahead. The system is under-policed.
But the small amount of policing that exists exerts enough social pressure to stop widespread flouting of the rules. I was happy to provide proof that my very-soon-to-be-expiring transfer was from a valid trip.
I'm sorry that you've had a poor interaction with an officer, but I think it's partially a matter of how one treats officers. Even when I've been in the wrong, I did my best to treat them with respect and I quite honestly have been treated well by every police I've dealt with, save one exception when I was pulled over in America. I accept that this happens, and a curt reply and a stiff ticket is not the end of the world and I am happy to have largely lived and traveled in places where the police were civil.
That's because you haven't been the victim of fabricated narratives supported by your tracked locations as data in order to imprison or blackmail you. This is just a rehashed "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about".
Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".
I didn't say nothing to worry about I said that, on balance, location tracking probably helps law abiding citizens more than it hurts them. It's an economic choice.
I am far less likely to initiate a serious crime in Canada than I am to be falsely accused of a serious crime. It is hard to fake exhaust data and saying "I saw him near the John St Starbucks at 9am with a gun" is fakeable just by following someone around. You don't need my Google data to prove it. It's on the CCTV cameras, it's on the cellphone towers my phone is pinging, etc.
I understand this makes people nervous, and I agree that there is something to be nervous about, but when I talk about the practical choice of recording your location data to a provider like Google I don't see much practical downside at the present time.
That's really making the assumption that this didn't happen before data tracking.....
And that argument is much, much older than the digital age. If anything, extra tracking helps exonerate more than without it (false imprisonment, etc) https://time.com/wrongly-convicted/
The reality is that data can be used to your benefit or against you. Having more of it doesn't shift the balance one way or another. It just means there's more opportunities to take it one way or the other.
Your times article also makes no mention of location tracking raising exoneration rates. It talks most prominently about how cheap faulty field drug tests contributed significantly to the improper convictions.
If you're innocent, more information about what happened is more likely to exonerate you than incriminate you. If you're guilty, the extra data is more likely to incriminate you.
I'm assuming you mean local logging of your location, as opposed to burying it in a company's blackbox of a cloud. I think it's a far superior option from a privacy standpoint because you are in control of whether or not that information exists to the rest of the world. That is the critical differentiating factor.
I'm also assuming here that you are actively looking to have your location logged -- something most people do not explicitly sign up for before it starts happening for them (usually after it has manifested results, people accept it as some weird fact-of-life).
I think it was Isaac Asimov who wrote an article once speculating on a future utopia where there would be total information freedom and transparency - everyone would know everything about everyone's movements. You could see why it would be appealing - how could there be crime if you knew where everyone was at all times? No body could cheat on their spouse, no child would ever go missing. Seems hopelessly naive now of course but you can see how it would work as a thought experiment. In reality there'll always be a protected class who get to hide their movements.
Nobody could cheat secretly. They'd still cheat. The framing story in my favourite comic issue "Winter's Tale" has more or less exactly this be scenario, "I was going to tell you" he says. The people in Winter's Tale and most of that run (Gaiman's Golden Age of Miracleman) live in a utopia, but they're still people and they still cheat and lie. The larger point of the story is that children won't fill a hole in your heart.
Naive indeed; on the surface it sounds utopian. But who decides what a crime is? That's where it quickly flips over into becoming a dystopia. I mean, for example homosexuality is still a crime punishable by death in a lot of places; if you cannot hide that, then a lot of people would be picked up.
Your last point is exactly poignant; it'll be lawmakers who end up above the law, above the control. Which makes it more like 1984 than a "borg" utopia.
I do expect the Right to Privacy will be brought up again to the Supreme Court as a result of making use of location history sometime in the next five years.
Indeed, I believe the first use of the "Right to Privacy" was by a lawyer and Louis Brandeis, and future Supreme Court Justice, upset that a journalist had written that one of them attended a wedding.
Depending on who brings to suit, I expect it's likely that even the conservative justices will suddenly agree with a right to privacy.
Which world would you prefer? A world where not a single crime would go unpunshied, and hence serious crime would probably disappear forever, but with the risk of the Government or criminals (would they still exist??) abusing the data for their own advantage? Or a world as we have today where a lot of crime happens everywhere and where a criminal just needs to be smart enough to never get caught? I am not sure the answer is as straightforward as everyone seems to think here. I think I would be willing to at least run an experiment about this (perhaps China is already doing it).
Good points. Those who don't have their information exposed, are those with power. They know everything about you, but you know nothing about them, or even how much access to your life that they have.
The downside is, the government have 0 business knowing where I am, or where I go. I don't need to justify my right for privacy. And the argument of "if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear" is lame, and toxic, that is like saying, you don't drive that much, is ok to force you to take the bus.
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 :)
> Using the console's background connectivity, a Nintendo 3DS in Sleep Mode can automatically discover other Nintendo 3DS systems within range, establish a connection, and exchange content for mutually played games, all transparently and without requiring any user input.
> For example, in Rhythm Heaven Megamix, if the user passes by someone with the same software, they will take on a figure-fighting duel challenge.
There's also a handful of free games that come with the console, so you're not limited to people who own the same games.
There was a puzzle one where you got a random starting piece, and you could copy one piece from each person you passed that they owned. Sometimes you'd go past someone with the entire puzzle, sometimes you'd already have all the pieces someone else did (which is kind of fun in its own right).
I miss that there's nothing like that on Switch, but it was not great for the battery life.
(actually, on the original DS there was a game called The World Ends With You that implemented this feature at the game level, too. OS-level is a big improvement, but it was still neat there, especially since it gave you a bonus even for passing DSes that didn't hvae the game running)
When my wife and I combined our photo libraries later in life, we found a photo of the two of us, back-to-back at a ball a few years before we first met.
I wrote software to find minimum spacetime distance between camera rolls using embedded GPS. It runs all client side if someone wants to try it out or take up the mantle.
https://github.com/Lucent/photo-distance
My wife and I were apparently at a party of a mutual friend two years before we met. Neither of us remembers the other being there. Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough!
Aww so sweet. I love stories like this. My wife and I met by chance in Seattle in 2014, having grown up on different coasts, but there was a period in the 1980's where we lived <50 miles apart and I always wonder whether we ever met by chance as kids. That's so amazing you found that photo. We will have to combine photo albums like you and see what we learn.
There's a reddit comment where the poster recalled, how his parents would take the family on far away cities for vacation. The parents would then do parent things and the kids would just walk around the cities. In several different cities in several different vacations, he and and his sister would run into this kid. After a few times, the kid would run being freaked out, but the poster and his sister managed to "catch" him once, and introduced him to their parents. It turns out, the poster's parents knew the kid's parents, and at vacation times, the sets of parents would travel to the same location and partner swap with each other...
> The parents would then do parent things and the kids would just walk around the cities
Apart from the final plot twist, this was surprisingly normal when I was a kid in the 1970s. The number of times my sister and I were left sitting outside a pub, either at a picnic table or even waiting in the car while the adults were inside having fun...
Similar, but also with Google's help: on the second date with my current girlfriend, we took a selfie. Google Photos then identified her face from a picture I had snapped five years previously... it turned out we had already met at a wedding, had a somewhat tipsy and flirtatious conversation, but since we then lived a long distance apart, and I was still disentangling myself from a previous relationship, I didn't make an attempt to follow up at the time, just left with a vague memory of "cute girl in city X, it would have been nice to get to know her under different circumstances." Now I live in city X and the circumstances are so much better :)
I spent a week working at the Inmos plant in Colorado Springs in 1989, thousands of miles from where I lived at the time. It turns out I drove past my wife's house every day that week. We didn't meet until 1996.
I went to school with the brother of my older brother's girlfriend; in an old picture of me on graduation day, she's in the background to attend her brother's graduation. This was 17 years ago, I believe they've been dating for about ten years now.
The last person I dated and I figured out we had probably been literally face to face a couple years before at an event, and I was probably talking to her boyfriend about something.
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, how long I took lunch, etc).
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.
You just invented the next great dating app. Because I can “game” saying I like or do something, but having to both physically be there and review it is a cool angle. The catch (outside the crazy permissions) would be it would greatly hurt smaller cities: “oh you really like the only Starbucks in town? Me too!”
FourSquare was great, their gamified app made it fun for us to check in to locations. My friend works for his city's local council, not too high a position. We all call him the mayor of the city, because he used to be the mayor of a lot of places there on FourSquare.
I agree it's a great use of location data, but why not use a completely client-side solution? Personally I use the Arc app[0] to record my location history. I did notice decreased battery life but I still have enough battery for a full day.
> 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
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.
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 hobby?
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.
I'm a Catholic so I attend Church often and in my experience, it really depends on how the Parish runs; in some places, people literally show up 5-10 minutes before Mass and then rush to the parking lot as soon as it ends, so you never have a chance to speak to anyone.
However, in contrast, my fiance is from Peru and goes to a Latin Church; there you have a very strong sense of community and can meet plenty of people. Also, you probably won't be meeting your SO at the Church directly but you will most likely be introduced _through_ someone from the community (especially older people who have bigger families).
The other thing about religious communities is that "dating" is not about hookups or casual sex but more about about finding life long partners and marriage. This can be a blessing or a curse depending on what stage of life you are in (though if you are truly devout, you won't mind) so it's not perfect.
Anyway, for non religious people, there are still plenty of ways to meet: Volunteering programs, social clubs, sport centers, etc.
The only advice I would give is meet as many people as possible because chances are your potential partner will be introduced to you through friends of friends eventually.
Unitarian Universalist Church. Ethical Culture Society. There are quite a few non-credal churches or "not-a-church" organizations built along churchy lines.
I would argue in the current climate "political activism" and "political groups" have replaced God and the Church as a religion. Secular, certainly, religious absolutely. I've heard from some people that they won't even consider dating someone who has even an iota difference in political views. If this doesn't sound like religious dogma I'm not sure what would.
Not sure if it exists in your country, but all over Europe there are "Civic Centers" that host various cultural events, activities and curses where you can meet people from all walks of life. Great place to meet people with the same interests as you and usually hosts relatively cheap events as it's meant to be attend-able for all people.
Are we talking about paying for seats to spectate? Cause if so - I highly disagree. You might get lucky every so often but I found people generally keep to themselves/their friend group.
I had a primary care physician ask me where I met my wife.
He was old, early 80s (since retired and passed on) and said he had been asking his patients that his whole career, and had been keeping track.
I met my wife at a bar. Now, this was pre-smart-phone era, I will grant you that.
He said that a little more than 80% of his patients met their spouse at a bar. He said every time he heard someone say "You need to go to church", "you need to volunteer", or any other thing like that, he would interject that no, you need to go out drinking and carousing with friends. And always with friends. Apparently, out drinking and carousing alone is not nearly as effective.
You will have to accept the word of dead physician from the 1990s on that. Post 2008, the numbers have likely shifted.
But I still recommend drinking and carousing with friends. (That doesn't mean heavy drinking, you don't have to get plastered to carouse)
I would go as far as saying that most long-term couples meet after university (at least for people who were born after 1980, let's say). During university, a lot of people are still in the experimentation phase. I feel like later in life, maybe end 20s/early 30s, you had enough time to get to know yourself, and know what kind of person you are, what you care about, etc.
Of course, this is anecdotal and based on myself and my friends. But just as a counterpoint to your "go to university" advice =)
Most people have or have had significant others. Although some have met them at university most have not.
I have had several relationships where at the time I would have called the person my significant other but in retrospect there have only been 2 that have truly been significant to my life. I met my wife at a bar. A few years after she passed, I met my now girlfriend of 12 years at a farmers market where she was selling pickles and kimchi.
I noted in long form above. I met my wife in a bar.
I had a primary care physician in the late 1990s that had been polling his patients on that his whole career, and said that a little more than 80% of his patients met at a bar. So there you go.
I also agree with your assessment on partners, I have had a couple that were important at the time, but looking back, where more like friends with benefits. Only two were really significant. One that tortured me emotionally and basically set me up for over sensitive warning flags for about five years, what a mess. The other one I married over 25 years ago.
The story leads with the fact that the author met her boyfriend on Bumble, despite attending the same university and living in the same city for five years. So that's a surprising takeaway.
I thought the same, but I am generation older. It made me think: Does anyone still ask people out for dates in real life? I am sure some, but the ratio must be incredibly low now after online dating became so common. To be clear: I do not think this is worse. For example, with the rise of different types of dating apps, it does seem that women (seeking men) have more agency in their dating life. In my generation (and culture), women almost never asked out men, so they were always waiting for romance to happen to them. Of course, this has changed significantly. Some part is the rise in agency of women (education, earnings power, social changes, etc.), and some part dating apps.
Online dating is common but it doesn’t usually work for the average man. It will work for most women but most women don’t use it.
Most men still need to find a partner through other means like cold approach (terrible - it’s highly dependent on looks just like Tinder) or through warm approach (friends of friends, hobbies, social groups, etc. - this is where most average men meet their partners).
The issue now is the growing number of single men. This number keeps going up every year and it doesn’t look to be improving. It’s definitely leading to some not-so-great side effects. (The number of single women is growing more slowly)
First, do you have any sources? Most (Western culture) highly-educated women that I know use online dating apps.
Second, as I understand, a major issue about dating with highly-educated people: Women (almost) always want to meet same socio-economic status or above. Dear HN readers: Read that last sentence mathematically: Greater than or equal (>=)! As women are quickly holding more than 50% of highly educated jobs (economically practical masters degrees and above), this creates a huge mismatch. See: Medicine, science, finance, technology jobs. (Commentary: By 2030/40/50, I feel a huge portion of medicine will be women. Great!)
Real-world example: If a man is a public pre-school or elementary school teacher (middle to lower income), his chances to meet a high-income woman are very low in 2022.
On the contrary, many (Western culture) men are happy to meet / date / marry women whom have (far) lower socio-economic status. "Sexy, not smart." In the classic (out-dated) cultural view, this is "big (male) boss" dates/marries low socio-economic status executive assistant ("secretary"). I have observed this is quickly coming to an end in the last twenty years.
Real questions:
(1) Whom are high-income male bosses dating these days? I assume: High-income women whom are breaking the glass ceiling for senior roles. (Great! I support these women 152%!) Or: These men date younger (and younger!). I have observed both in my professional career.
(2) Whom are low-income/-education female executive assistants dating these days? I assume they are mostly single. Why? They want to meet high-income men, but these men are more-and-more focused on other (still rare!) high-income women(!).
Final comment that is very (deeply!) personal: If you are not alpha-male or very high income, it is difficult to meet highly-educated women. Basically, they are "vaccuumed/Hoovered" (sorry: American English slang!) by other high-income/status or alpha men. It is so tough. Please, please, do not read this final paragraph as discriminatory against women whom choose these men. Dating is complex! Personally, my dream is to meet someone who is a science researcher (academic) with a low salary, but passionate about their work. Lots to talk about!
Last: Please, please don't read any of this post as something negative towards women. No, exactly the opposite. I am more interested in how wealthly, highly-educated societies will rebalance when women hold more than 50% of educated positions (very soon in rich countries!). In my view, it is terrific that women finally have equal opportunity in my society. My mother never had these opportunities, but her daughters will finally have the chance for economic equality. Huzzah.
If you have the time to write this all out - you have the time to find the supporting statistics. Most women don't use online dating - they've tried it but they don't use it. This is why the apps are overwhelmingly male. (Anywhere from 2:1 (lowest I've ever seen) to 9:1 depending on region and app)
High income women end up marrying their college partners. A lot of these gals meet their partner in college and never separate. That's how I see it for the majority of women I've known in SV. Exceptions being those who didn't go to college and weren't going to pursue a high income profession (or were but bailed on it) but inevitably chose it later.
It's hard to meet these women because they are few in percentage and like most women - they don't go out to meet men. They might use dating apps, they might date a coworker, they might date someone in their social circle. So, you're not likely gonna meet them organically at a hobby or anything.
This used to be what everyone said. I remember an introductory talk at university where they explicitly said 'and most of you will meet your future spouses here' as if it was part of the package. Feels like just a few years ago it used to be everyone met their partner at university.
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.
But if instead of having a relationship that lasts forever, you value having a meaningful romantic relationship that lasts 5 or 10 years, university is pretty good.
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.
The interesting aspect of that, is what Google and other authorities do with such data. They can be unlocking all sorts of private trivia, unbeknown to any of the users involved, to an extent far beyond any are suspecting.
That could include such authorities, manipulating or interfering with events and lives, more than anybody would think possible or should be legally allowed.
Just for clarity, there was a "could" in there, in the context of what I stated.
Google and other authorities having such access to so much data about individuals, means they can know of relationships, that the interacting individual parties involved don't know about each other. So, if a wife were cheating on her husband, that can be known. A line can be crossed, where information is leaked to the husband, in various ways. This of course is just a "theoretical" example, of many other kinds of possibilities.
Access to private and personal information is its own kind of power, that can be easily abused under many gray areas, and under all kinds of pretexts and weak justifications.
Nowhere near this level of detail. Telecoms providers (until "hyperlocal" 5G base stations become commonplace) have very coarse location info compared to GPS (as well as other sources a typical smartphone uses such as Wi-Fi triangulation). Even with 5G, smartphone-determined location data is likely to still be much more accurate.
They have the data, but they make sure to not show that they have the data, because they are very aware of how creepy it would be. They spent a lot of time on optics.
Do people who see ads get ads based on where they've been by the way?
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?
If Google built such a product, you'd probably find it on their graveyard. So it's best to be careful and not antagonize them; because always remember: You only have one digital life, so keep your head down and don't blow it.
I wish that was pure /s, but the amount of "Ask HN: Google banned me or my business for no obvious reason" is really staggering. (n.b.: Of course I'm talking about the old Google of 2022, not about the glorious overlords that Google since has become; all praises the holy trinity of Android, Google Search and Google Glurp for Glorps! Please don't ban me.)
Funny nobody can even tell why they ban somebody because ML just won't tell them why. "Hey, our ML_ANOMALY_20220430_6C2DBE3AFC model ensemble has told us to ban you, so we are banning you! There is no recourse (unless you have friends at Google). Please don't contact us ever again. We will ban all the people from the whole block around you as well."
Yeah. Due to this topic I actually thought "oh, good idea, I should automatically download my whole Google data once every month; better safe than sorry". Then I realized that this might get me banned, because actual bad actors probably do that as well.
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).
This depends a lot on your SO and your relationship to her/him/them. Given exactly the pretext from the blog post: I can easily think of a past relationship where I'd totally agree with you (very distrustful person who could not have resisted the urge to maliciously interpreted the data), and another relationship where I'd be totally cool with it (except I wouldn't want the heat map to be public). For most of my past relationships (and my current, final relationship) however such a request is unrealistic anyway; they simply don't have the technical ability to do such an analysis.
A girlfriend may not be as trustworthy, as some people seem to think or at least no more than what is selfishly beneficial and to her advantage. Lots of guys find this out, way too late.
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.
I’ve wanted detailed tracking for years. Something that logged my position every five seconds or something. I wanted this to be something that other people did too.
Then we can decide to share histories and see when we ever overlapped or were near each other. For instance - I became close friends with someone this summer but it turns out we were both at the same events across the USA about 8 years ago. It made me wonder where else we had both been and hadn’t really spoken to each other.
I’ve also wanted this to be a live feature as well where you can opt in to share your location and be like, “hey, Jim is just a block away. What a coincidence! Jim is usually 1500 miles from you.” As a way to run into friends you haven’t seen in a while.
Another instance is that I had lost touch with a friend from years back. We had both lived in Seattle for years. I eventually moved to SF and was at an event. I stepped outside a few times to get air and on one of the times I did - I saw this old friend walk by on the street (it’s almost midnight - he was going to go home to sleep with someone). I call out his name and he’s in shock and awe. We decide to hang out for 30 minutes and decided that this was the sign we needed to reconnect.
That happened about 5 years ago and we’ve been very close ever since.
Sometimes I feel like these kinds of things would be cool to have. Or to do a prospectus and see a year ago - “oh interesting - that guy I gave a ride to five years ago was at the same restaurant as me… Huh - I wonder why we didn’t see each other?” The world is much smaller than we realize. I’ve run into people in small rural parking lots of grocery stores in random countries 8,000 miles away from where we both had known each other without any coordination. If I had been even 10s later in my actions - I would’ve never seen them sometimes.
I have a lot of stories like this. Timing is everything!!
If you are interested in tinkering with personal data exports using SQL, my friend and I made Bionic: https://github.com/bionic/bionic.
The README includes an example of calculating songs you often listen to while walking/driving/using public transit (by combining Google Maps and Spotify data).
After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.
But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
Wow, this is really neet! Whenever I see R (and the tidyverse in general) I always can't believe how clean and easy it to to do aebitary data visualisation like this.
Yeah. I really enjoyed my time as a data scientist when I was fluent in R and the tidyverse stuff (in particular ggplot and dplyr). It felt like a super power. People were consistently amazed at how quickly I could visualise brand new data.
This sounds sort of similar to Strava Flybys[0]. It users your run/ride location data and show people who posted public activies that passed you by. Sometimes interesting, but I bet a lot of Strava users who post their activities as "public" don't know this feature exists and might turn to "followers only" if they did.
This existed as a massive data-leak for a really long time. The "API" didn't have any meaningful protection, and the service was opt-in.
It was really easy to download flyby exports for any activity and do analysis.
I had a script downloading my Strava recordings of my commute and the associated fly-by data and was easily able to figure out all of the people I was seeing on the way to/from work. Since it linked to the activities and included profile pictures and names, you could easily figure out a lot.
If I remember correctly, you could still see fly-bys of other peoples' rides even if your own was private or followers-only.
It was a pretty massive oversight for a company like Strava - and a bit of an eye opener for me about what kind of data I might be leaking by making "harmless" activities like riding my bike into public data.
It's carved out as a specific permission on the privacy page now - https://www.strava.com/settings/privacy - and also explicitly mentioned as turned off for "only you" activities, but no mention if it's exposed if your activity is "followers only".
"There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning."
Can people now just meet each other without an App? Is it generally possible to just kick off conversations with people you haven't been introduced to? I mean if these two were sitting under the same apple tree, they'd be on their phones checking out Bumble, surely?
It's just so much easier to do it using an app. You are pretty much guaranteed that people you match with are also looking for something similar or at least open to the idea. No guessing or attending places for sole reason of hunting down a partner, which is quite creepy anyways. It's definitely possible to find some without an app, but not everyone is willing to just wait for that magical moment of meeting the right person at the right time.
There are always people fishing IRL :) I'd argue that you have better chances compared to an app since you are there in person compared to a digital profile. It's more memorable.
It always took practice to be good at this, but apps made a lot of people lazy so I'm not sure about trends.
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.
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.
This is an analysis should probably be read while listening to Dave Matthews Band Ants Marching. Really cool analysis and fun to see it written in R.
Jerr Thorpe had an app that gave you your power back and tracked your phone info in a way you could have yourself for awhile but it became abandonware and started eating battery life so I took it off my phone. OpenPaths, that was it's name. https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths
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!
It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
> 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. On the 16th of August 2017, exactly one week short of three years before we would meet, we’re recorded at the same GPS coordinates in this spot where I frequently had lunch, near a coffee booth in the social sciences building. Did he just trot past on the stairs? Did he take a seat in the shade under the trees? Did we queue together in line for coffee? I guess Google doesn’t have the answer for everything. but it’s pleasant to imagine when we have our coffee together every morning that years before we may have silently enjoyed coffee near each other.
This is very sweet. I hope by the time I get married I'm this good at coding, so I too could see all the times my husband almost met me! By then there might be cameras with years of accessible history scattered around the city.
This 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?
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.
All depends on your threat model. A company openly collecting your data by your say so seems significantly less threatening (to me, to many others) than all the actors who are doing it without your knowledge or consent.
I consider Google to already be an agent that is working for me. It obviously has its own interests, which are not perfectly aligned with mine. But its interests and my interests in the space of location data collection are sufficiently aligned that I don't object to them having it.
The point is, any / all data collection is - or should be - suspect. Today's benevolent actor is tomorrow's victim of a hack, or simply changes their spots. Furthermore, even data that is positioned as harmless (i.e., phone call metadata) can tell stories.
Finally, per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (and others) these minor privacy infringements add up and is used against us.
Read the book. Once you come to realize the collecting of your data isn't "passive" and that ultimately, it's being done to be used against you - and your free will - your perceived benefits are insignificant.
Put another way, being complacent and complicit not only sells-out your own privacy, it compromises the privacy of all those round you, your (future) offspring, etc.
I'm not going to read a whole book about this issue.
I already know that the collecting of data isn't passive. I deny that it's being done to be used against me. I also deny any concrete harms for most people on the short to medium term, although the far future is hard to predict.
Given that I deny the likelihood of harm to this data collection, I'm setting a concrete benefit against no drawbacks. Therefore I will continue to use it.
In some camps, a couple of years ago, the book was on a number of "Book of Year" lists. The issue is far less simplistic than you're making it out to be. That fact that you dismiss the risks and dangers is something - funny enough - covered in the book as well.
p.s. Not passive, as in the aim is to be proactive (in influencing behavior). There are plenty of other sources that explore how fragile "free will" is, so maybe we can do that some other time? :)
Do you find you convince many people with this style of argumentation? I used to do it this way but it never worked out for me. You think I'm naive, but in fact I just have different priorities from you, and different estimates of the likelihood of outcomes.
Odd. From my POV, there's nothing to argue here. You've decided. And per you, that decision is final.
Once you said, "I'm not going to read...to learn new things..." the conversation was over on my end. The line was drawn. But, for the record, there are other here that might be interested in new ideas and new perspectives, and the flaws in their own. It's why I'm here. So for completeness and fairness to others, I played through.
I'm fairly confident you didn't hear an idea I referenced. So to me, it's odd that you perceive someone was trying to argue with you. Why would anyone bother? You're immune to all outside influences, yes?
It's not on to say someone said something, and put quotes around it, when they did not actually say that thing. Your quote would be misleading even if it only enclosed the words I did say, since you took away the context (you told me to read a whole particular book on a subject, I said I would not -- nobody has time to read every book a random internet commenter tells them to read). But enclosing words I didn't even say in quotes as well to make me sound even more unreasonable is beyond the pale.
Interesting how sometimes it does not matter. You meet in spacetime. I would not have relationships with my wife, who is subjectively perfect, have we met earlier in our lives. We have discussed this on multiple occasions and the conclusion was definite.
Years ago I boarded an almost empty plane from my country to a country where I had just started to live. The crew let a printed list of the passengers on one of the seats, I took the list and stored it somewhere. Flash forward few years later: I had met a lot of people in that country, inclusive from my own country. And one day, I rediscovered that boarding list I had totally forgotten about, just to find out that I had ended up knowing one of the persons on it.
This is delightful. I also live in Cape Town and met my girlfriend on Bumble right after the lockdowns (and curfews) ended. I’m tempted to do this as well
this is fascinating. i'd be interested in an anonymous dating app where i feed in my location and it matches me up with others... highly likely that if we like the same places then we might like each other (or at least, dating might be a bit easier)
There's actually a dating app with a similar-ish concept called Happn (https://happn.com/), which basically is Tinder but if Tinder only showed you the profiles of people you had actually crossed paths with in real life. Fun fact! Not exactly what you said but close!
i guess the next question is of those 33 recorded instances (or 41.25 possible instances), how many people were around the two of them? if they were literally standing within arms reach of each other, but also within arms reach of a dozen other people, it may not be that interesting if they never connected. but if they were within 5 meters of each other, and there weren't anyone else within a 100 meters of the two of them, that would have been a pretty awful missed connection.
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.
Could this be an idea for an app? You can search your contacts and it will show location, date and time of when you were less than 20 feet from each other.
>> 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.
You say creepy, I find it to be an incredible level of trust on one side and maturity on the other side. It could have easily be "I can’t tell you where I was" and "wow you met Alissa a lot in 2005, I'm gonna break up"
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 tracks them
How can you infer that? She clearly had access to his location history, it's extremely unlikely that it happened without his consent. This is rather a vibe of two enthusiastic geeks being genuinely curious about analyzing some cool data about themselves, rather than anyone being "overly attached". We can't tell for sure without more details about their relationship, which isn't our business at all, so talking about "big red flags" feels really wrong and paternalistic (which in fact sounds like a big red flag :P).
> Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history?
How can I infer that? Easily… if she is openly able to do this. What are those things that she is quietly doing? If she already has access to his location, chances are that one night at 7 PM when he hasn’t come back, she is checking for patterns.
Funny how everyone is so oblivious and saying ‘ohhh I find it so cute’
I agree, sometimes. But doing a full data-science analysis of where me and my partner where for the past 7-8 years to see how close we where, even though we are already together, doesn’t sound promising either.
Nevertheless, I think in general, people should learn that some will agree and others will disagree. There is no wrong or right. If some of you find this ‘cute’ and ‘amazing’ that is perfect. You should also understand and respect that some others find this ‘creepy’, ‘disturbing’ and a big ‘red flag’ for insecurity and annoying attachment.
Curiosity is now a red flag? I find the whole thing cute. She's not using the data for tracking down Dan and making him her boyfriend, they are already together and she simply wanted to see if they walked past each other in the past.
I do have my location history activated, and so does lots of people around me. I'm neither a Google employee nor am I ignorant that Google tracks me both physically and digitally.
But being able to have a timeline of where I am at times have been both helpful and interesting, so I'm willing to trade that data for the functionality I receive for it.
If you do know of a better solution that gives me the same data but is not Google, please feel free to share it. I haven't found anything like that that completely abuses my battery at the same time and also guarantees to not sell my data.
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 out of the cloud and in your direct possession. I think it can be useful and interesting to have this data on yourself, I just think Google shouldn't have it.
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.
I leave the feature on and I'm not a Google employee or ignorant of the fact Google tracks my location data. I find value in having the data myself and don't care that Google also has it. I also just asked my girlfriend if she has disabled it and she hasn't. She isn't a Google employee and is aware it is being recorded. So there are 2 more people. Is it possible you are in fact in the minority in disabling it?
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."
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.
A guy I worked for long ago was part of a partnership of architects and they split up. One of the other partners was known for never parting amicably and sued him. He claimed they had agreed on something and my client had failed to deliver and thus owed him some large sum. He presented notes he had allegedly taken during the talk they had a few years earlier including date and time and the word of another partner as support, who claimed to have been present.
My client checked his old calendars and just found the word "Copenhagen" for that + the previous day. With a bit of searching and checking, he figured out that he was incredibly lucky: he had been in Copenhagen that day to sail in a regatta, had lots of witnesses and photographs and easily won the case, the other two got into hot water for falsifying documents and giving false statements, though I don't know the outcome.
He was lucky to have had a multi-day thing and putting it into his calendar. Not sure if "Google showed me being far away" would've stood up, but it can certainly be useful to know your location a few years ago.
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.
Everyone already replied with their use cases and I've been in several similar ones.
In general, I obtain a huge amount of value in being able to know what happened in my own past. This can be both for work and for personal reasons. For this, my calendar and Google Timeline are the two tools I use the most.
Most usefulness is in the past 1-2 weeks, and things become less useful over time, right up until they become extremely useful. For example "Oh crap, I lost this thing, the last time I saw it was on this date. What are the possible places I could have lost it? Let's retrace."
It's hard to convey how much things change once you're able to reliably have this information. Your mindset changes. Things you couldn't do before are unlocked.
I would love a better Google Timeline, one whose data I personally own especially. I suspect there will be an explosion of these types of apps at some point once people catch up.
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.
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.
I had my catalytic converter stolen. Thanks to location history I could check when I left the car there and when I came back and noticed the problem. Since at first I didn't know problem was result of a theft I didn't take note of the time when I noticed the problem and I also could recall for how long the car stayed there.
Location history enabled me to accurately and confidently report the time window when crime occurred to the police.
I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
> I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
Correct.
> As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
That was not the desired outcome. My desired outcome was to make reporting to the police go as smoothly for me as possible which I'd preferably entirely skip if not for the fact that insurer required me to report it.
Talking to the police (or anyone really) is a stressful event for me so any help with establishing what to say was very much appreciated.
On semi-related note my car is at repair shop for 3 months already and I have no idea how much longer will it be because apparently no supplier of catalytic converters is willing to estimate when they'll have a single item for Toyota Auris.
Sure, but when I had my radio stolen back in the day, police officer politely notified me that they know who generally breaks into cars to steal radios in my area, but unless it was reported in an hour or two, they won't be able to get it before it's resold or pin it on the culprit, so unless I need it for insurance, I shouldn't even bother reporting.
In cases like these, insurance mostly needs a paper trail, and police are very well aware of that, and they won't look for specifics. They'll probably even suggest what to fill in: that's at least my experience.
I feel for your experience though, and I wish you your car back on the road asap.
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 ;)
The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.
The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.