IMO, the most game changing feature announced today is 'Now on tap'
Google isn't releasing more details on it, but with it, Google would be able to understand what you do, when you do it, who your pals are, who you go out to movies with, who you chat with the most, are you looking to quit your job, are you about to break up, are you going through a depression and so on...
They haven't revealed anything about how exactly 'Now on tap' works...but the potential for data collection is enormous. With 'Now on tap' they promise to do 'searches' based on the context (which is derived from the contents in the app that's showing on-screen). So no matter what app you're using, Google will get its hand on the data. It sounds nightmarish and exciting at the same time.
What scared me about that announcement was that "no changes in the app are necessary" which basically means that google from now on will parse the text that is displayed, regardless of the type of app that is open.
Without any further clarification i have to expect Google now to send the displayed data of my mobile banking app to its servers everytime i hit that "Now on Tap" button, accidentally or not, while its open. I don't like that.
This only works if the developer uses app indexing where Google can search through the content and make it searchable to end users and other endpoints. It doesn't come for free so Google has no access to things like your bank app's screen.
The presenter actually mentioned app indexing on stage at some point so I think it does rely on the developer opting into indexing.
On the other hand, it's not clear to me that the user opts into the indexing, so Google might suddenly silently be getting access to a huge number of user's deep within-app data without them realising it. But that is old news, app indexing has been around for a while.
I think the way to think about it is Google is doing what it does best: search. They use whatever content they can scrape from the screen using the view hierarchy once the user signals intent that they want to search. It's a faster way to do search using context (in this case the screen) to provide the "keywords". The app indexing part is how they are able to show related apps with deep links. They use app indexing of other apps to find relevant results for the query.
App indexing makes sense when you have more stable content inside of an app like a traditional public website. Think Yelp and their 'screen' per place inside of the app. It doesn't make sense to publish the contents of a chat conversation to Google's app index -- that would be a huge privacy leak! It would be the equivalent of GoogleBot indexing my Gmail inbox.
I am curious if this will be a source of friction with app developers. If Google is scraping app data usage for both content and context ostensibly to extend the benefit of that app's data and utility, wouldn't that make it considerably easier for them to clone the app and improve upon it?
I don't think the same engineers that work on products like some new app even have access to the kind of data that would come from that feature, nor does that sort of snooping even occur at google. It's not the NSA
That attitude seems naive. Google took a stab at replacing Wikipedia with Google Knol, Yelp (or was it Foursquare) with Google Places, and that's just two examples that spring to mind. It seems expected that Google would mine its own data for trends and look at how they could use that data to drive new app development or make existing third party apps irrelevant by rolling new features into Google Now, even if that data is mined only "in aggregate".
I would hope this to be correct, but I didn't see Google address it at all. A lack of transparency is a great way to foster FUD and a bad perception of what could be a great piece of tech. I get that they're building the marketing hype first, so hopefully it will be forthcoming.
> Google would be able to understand what you do, when you do it, who your pals are, who you go out to movies with, who you chat with the most, are you looking to quit your job, are you about to break up, are you going through a depression and so on...
Google isn't releasing more details on it, but with it, Google would be able to understand what you do, when you do it, who your pals are, who you go out to movies with, who you chat with the most, are you looking to quit your job, are you about to break up, are you going through a depression and so on...
They haven't revealed anything about how exactly 'Now on tap' works...but the potential for data collection is enormous. With 'Now on tap' they promise to do 'searches' based on the context (which is derived from the contents in the app that's showing on-screen). So no matter what app you're using, Google will get its hand on the data. It sounds nightmarish and exciting at the same time.