Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole class of tech like this for me. An Alexa/Echo/etc, a fitness tracker with GPS and sleep monitoring, a maps program that learns my routine and integrates with a weather app, and so on.

And ideally? All of it integrated. It actually sounds nice to say "I'm going home", and have Maps say "today that will take 35, should your oven start preheating when you're 20 minutes out?" IoT devices are overrated, but I can absolutely imagine a critical mass of integrated tools being very useful.

But I'm not even slightly willing to do that. It's too much information and too much risk surface. I'd pay a hefty premium to get local-data-only versions of these products, but no one is offering that, and it doesn't look like they're going to start.

View on HN

>a maps program that learns my routine and integrates with a weather app

That sounds awesome until the company providing that service starts abusing their knowledge of their location. That abuse doesn't even have to necessarily be malicious in nature either. For example, Google Maps on Android started asking me to rate, review, and/or take photos of my present location if they deemed it a point of interest (certain restaurants, parks, etc). I never opted in to this feature and the only way to disable it that I've figured out is to literally disable all location services on the phone.

I really dislike the idea of Google storing a timestamped record of almost every place I've ever visited. Tt has to beconstantly phoning home in order to deliver the request to document my visit within a minute or two of my arrival and that constant reminder that Big Brother Google is tracking me at every moment is just disturbing on so many levels. Even if they aren't using that data right now, remember the "data is never destroyed" principle of the internet.

On a side note, I would have ditched Android if I didn't need it for work simply because use of the GPS radio is hidden behind the acceptance of enabling Google's Location system and all the invasions of privacy that entails.

I feel the same way. Between that and my overuse of my phone for checking hn, reddit, etc. I am considering trying to make a habit of leaving my phone at home when I leave the house, at least some of the time. It's a shame that I feel that way about such an incredible useful device, but there it is.

I like home automation but there are certain things I would never connect to the internet. Oven is one of them.

Maps currently does do what you're saying - Google knows the time I'm going home and displays current traffic information and estimated time to arrive, at least for me.

Not yet preheating the oven though :)

Same. But it gets such obvious things wrong. Instead of "traffic to [daycare center] is light" it says "traffic to [some weird company name probably registered in the same building] is light".

Waze also knows where I'm going in advance and most of the time it gets it right, like every Thu evening "are you heading to [evening school] ?". My weekly schedule is exactly the same 99% of the time but sometimes it still makes obvious mistakes. If you need an AI for that it must be a very simple one, yet it still fails.

Google maps also auto saves my parking location most of the time but other times it doesn't, for reasons unknown. Things like that make it hard for me to have faith in future versions of this stuff.

The bizarre thing is that Waze is owned by Google. People speculate they haven't merged information due to regulatory reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com