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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

I grew to like that Google could give me handy data.

I agree that this is useful; but sometimes I think Google tries a bit too hard to be helpful. For a few months, I visited my girlfriend every Thursday evening (and at other times as well, of course, but Thursday evenings were consistent). After we broke up, my phone would helpfully let me know every Thursday evening how long it would take to drive to her apartment.

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I realize that the reminder might cause unwanted emotion so soon after a breakup, but as long as it's easy to permanently dismiss the reminder, I would guess that the informativeness of the reminders when they were applicable far outweighed the brief heartache. But then again, I generally prefer to be given a stream of relevant information forthrightly and unfiltered, whether from humans or machines. I'll take the convenience even if it comes with the occasional unpleasantness.

But just wait. Someone will be really freaked out when one Thursday Google fails to show him the traffic to the girlfriend's house, then when he gets there, she breaks up with him.

The last bit reminds me of the father who found out his daughter was pregnant via Target's advertising.[0]

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

After a few months of frequently working weekends, Google started giving me directions to work on Saturdays when I stayed at home. I very much like the idea behind this kind of prompt but something like this has so much surface area that it's mostly impossible for them to handle every single edge case (like ours).

And each time you swipe it away, it'll ask you if you no longer want to receive directions to this location.

Ha! In my case it sometimes insists that I travel to work at random places at not really normal office times. Wish I could tell it I work from home or better yet it figure that out!

There's actually an option for this in the Google Now settings, but I don't have my Nexus anymore so I can't tell you exactly where. Should be something like unchecking "give me recommendations based on where I go" or something. I know you can also set home and work locations manually.

I run into this despite having set my work location manually. Either it's failing to handle identical work and home locations or it ignores the manual settings given enough "evidence".

The aggressive location-of-work detection is something I've run into as well. Last year it took four trips in three months before my phone decided that I worked at the airport.

Air travel is the context of another "overly helpful" issue: The "remind me where I parked" feature doesn't seem to make any attempt to distinguish between modes of transport, with the effect that when I enter the airport terminal after a flight my phone invariably decides that I need to be reminded where "I" parked the plane.

Same here man, eventually Google learned that I didn't want to do that anymore, but for a while it sucked to see that pop up every couple days.

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