Jolly useful or a bit spooky?: Motoring Non-motoring forum

Non-motoring > Jolly useful or a bit spooky?	Miscellaneous
Thread Author: Crankcase	Replies: 6

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Sun 18 Jan 15 09:05

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - Crankcase

Bought some cinema tickets the other day, and thought no more of it. They were sent by email to my gmail account.

On the night, an alert popped up on my phone to say that I would need to leave now to get there as the show started in 30 minutes.

Whilst I was aware this kind of thing was possible it's the first time it's all come together that way without me doing anything. Google read my mail, worked out the location and time of the cinema, worked out where I was, back calculated the distance, took traffic into account and prompted me, all with no intervention.

Mrs C thinks it's spooky. I think it's kind of clever but somehow leaves me a little bit uncomfortable, but I'm not sure why. Not enough to disable it all anyway.

Have you had this going on for ages and taken it in your stride, or have you not come across it?

Last edited by: Crankcase on Sun 18 Jan 15 at 09:05

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Sun 18 Jan 15 09:16

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - Zero

>> Have you had this going on for ages and taken it in your stride, or
>> have you not come across it?

Been aware of it for yonks, use it very little. I really became aware if it when, doing and fiddling with something else in the bowels of one of my devices I came across the list of locations it had tracked and saved me at. It was sufficiently comprehensive and accurate to be rather alarming.

I now have location services disabled, on all devices, and only enable them for a specific use at a specific time.

Have my calendars synched across devices of course.

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Sun 18 Jan 15 12:34

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - smokie

Google traffic seems to me to be incredibly accurate, but I now understand why.

I was approaching a small roundabout with a mate and Google maps was showing red for a short distance immediately after the roundabout. Seemed most odd to me, but it was true - there was a broken down car with and RAC van causing a short tail back. Mate reckoned the RAC van had called it in to Google, but I didn't think so, so I googled it. It turns out they use everyones mobile phone locations along with some complex algorithms to work out exactly how the traffic is going. Most impressive.

www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-traffic/

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Sun 18 Jan 15 12:36

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - No FM2R

I find it jolly useful. I have every bit of location tracking, history and guessing turned on. Why not?

It works brilliantly. If I have a criticism its that I end up relying on it and consequently stuff all goes a bit wrong if I forget to enter such things as an appointment, a change in time or location, or forget the phone entirely.

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Sun 18 Jan 15 15:50

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - Crankcase

Whe I'm thinking about Google, anyone tried the new "translating in real time" thing in the Google Translate app? The "word lens" thing which is now part of it is quite cool, but only the same as the standalone word lens that's been about for ages. But the real time thing is pretty patchy if you ask it to translate the tv.

It picked up a few phrases on the French channel, and amazingly to me, a few on the Arabic one (the first was some video of the Paris shenanigans and it translated "God be upon him", which left me trying to decide which "side" the news was coming from.)

But not tried it with a real person yet, which is what it's aimed at of course.

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Sun 18 Jan 15 16:01

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - Armel Coussine

>> some video of the Paris shenanigans and it translated "God be upon him", which left me trying to decide which "side" the news was coming from.)

Translation software is invariably naff where I have been able to assess it. In this case 'God be upon him' is almost certainly a mistranslation of 'Peace be upon him', a pious utterance Muslims sometimes use when they mention the Prophet.

Non-Muslims never use the bleating cry 'God is great', but I had a very annoying friend who took a prurient interest in all religion and always said 'peace be upon him' when he mentioned the Prophet. Used to drive me up the wall, poncy so-and-so. I wish he was still alive though.

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Sun 18 Jan 15 15:58

Jolly useful or a bit spooky? - Zero

>> I find it jolly useful. I have every bit of location tracking, history and guessing
>> turned on. Why not?

for a start it eats battery and data usage.

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