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by blamazon 1357 days ago
I'm with you. There is no setting. This drives me nuts on my motorcycle. I pick the nice scenic route, put the device into my pocket, (Bluetooth speakers in helmet) and then halfway through my very zen ride, this happens and I can do nothing but rage internally and try to remember to pull over and fix it, only for it to happen again 30 minutes later.

Google: you know I'm on a motorcycle. I see that on my location timeline page and marvel at the sophistication of technology. Please for the love of god if you won't give us a simple toggle for this behavior (I know you won't) just take the technology a tiny step farther and don't do this opt-out route changing thing if you detect I'm on a motorcycle.
1 comments
dTal 1356 days ago
How does it know you're on a motorcycle? I can imagine that it would be possible to detect fairly reliably with smartphone sensors (correlate curved ground path with gyro tilt), but it's astonishing and frightening that they would put in the effort to go that far.
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blamazon 1356 days ago
I think you pretty much described the mechanism there. My friends and I have experimented with "riding like a car" and we can trick the algorithm for short distances if we really think about keeping the phone upright.

The keywords to learn more seem to be "activity recognition API" and I'm pretty sure they have been doing the motorcycle thing for the better part of a decade:

https://developers.google.com/location-context/activity-reco...

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SanjayMehta 1356 days ago
Some 4-5 years ago someone analyzed an Android phone and showed they even know when you've exited a car.

I'll update this comment with a link when I find it.

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