Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mehrdadn 2565 days ago
This is interesting. By the raw data you mean from Google Takeout, or something else? Did you have to filter/smooth the data points?
2 comments

Also interested. Could you describe the process?
Sure. I pulled my data in the standard takeout.google.com/ process. The result is a json (? iirc). I parsed the json into x, y, and rasterized it using gdal.

https://imgur.com/a/ZhyTsDV

See I wasn't sure if I lost it in the couch in the living room, the office, or the bedroom. This got me within a few feet.

That's amazing, so cool.

Is that something Google's not doing with the data, but could? (E.g. they don't because their maps don't show most houses precisely enough or whatever, so it wouldn't be useful?)

Or is it relying on the fact that you are triangulating or similar from the known exact position of your WiFi routers or similar down to the inch, and Google doesn't have any way of knowing that?

Or they do and have internally assessed that it would be too creepy to provide to users, but are happily using it to better target advertising.
Or they have decided that it's too creepy to use at all, so they don't use it for targeted advertising. Seriously, why does everyone assume that companies are evilly cackling in volcano lairs? They know that violating user trust is really expensive and a bad idea.

By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen that Google's advertising targeting is only allowed to use "neighborhood level" location, which is designed to be coarse enough to not allow specifying individual people.

On the other hand, if the information is aggregated to a final answer, why is the data then kept? What if the _wrong people_ get ahold of the more sensitive information _because_ the data was kept beyond its useful life?
Because time and time again it is proven that "these companies" (Facebook and Google) will use any signal they can get their hands on to make money?

I'm pretty sure they've both been caught with their hands in the cookie jar doing things they swore they never would.

Because corporations have an underlying profit motive, so if there’s something that they _can_ do to make money, they will almost certainly try?

This isn’t a controversial point, it’s well observed.

From my experience from within large companies will do everything within the boundaries [1] of law to make more money.

[1] sometimes outside if they think they can argue it to be a novel situation

They are a business.

Their only goal is the make money - by definition. It is not that people assume that they are evil - just that they will follow on things that will earn them money.

No comment other than appreciation of the evil volcanic lair imagery.

Reminds me of Superjail, which is an uber-maximum security jail inside a volcano, that is itself inside a second volcano

Fiduciary duty to shareholders makes good people do bad things...
Do you get toilet paper ads when browsing in the restroom?
My new startup uses SDKs embedded into popular apps that make ultrasonic clicks and use sonar-like reflections to estimate the length of toilet paper remaining on the roll (using AI, machine learning, and blockchain, obviously). /s
Perhaps this level of location resolution is not stable enough at Google scale to present it? AKA: better to show reliable fuzzy information than unreliable precise information.
Considering that google has a history of cloaking information via the UI (see purchase history hidden if you have G Suite, but still fully accessible via takeout), and that Google offers advertisers the ability to see if you have visited a particular store even in an indoor mall, I am sure google knows your location more precise than it reports.
This is pretty cool, but I'm still confused on what data you used.

By my data, do you mean data from Google Android Device Configuration Service?

If you're logged into Chrome or GSuite tools from desktop locations, I just wonder how useful the data from those other products would be, if it even has location data.

I'm downloading my data archive to check it out...

I think its https://takeout.google.com/ where I got the data. Then its just a json which is relatively easy to parse.
Ha, this is an awesome use of the data. What a cool plot showing the "density" of pings.
Probably just looked at the last data point depending on the type of data was available. If its longitude / latitude values then its going to be pretty precise, although I would also like to know where to pull more granular data.
The GPS receiver isnt' sufficiently accurate for one point to be useful, but in aggregate, it was accurate 'enough'.

So although the numerical precision is pretty high, the actual accuracy is pretty low, I think I pulled all the points from 2am-6pm in the final time stamp to figure out where the phone was.

Envious, nay jealous of a room of that size.