[hack_edu]

Explain how Google Now is any more spyware than what goes on with browser tracking throughout the industry. That's no excuse for spyware, but there's little warrant in singling out Google here. In fact, Google Now seems to really just be the use of the data that's been tracked (by all parties discussed in this subcomment thread) for years into a package that's user facing and easier to digest.

And let's not fool ourselves that Apple isn't tracking in such a "spyware" fashion just the same.

[seiji]

Explain how Google Now is any more spyware than what goes on with browser tracking throughout the industry.

To me, Google Now is that thing reading all your email behind the scenes, parsing mostly unstructured text to form a coherent narrative of your life, then prompting you based on what it discovered. It's disturbingly useful and beyond creepy.

The only way Apple can compete with Google Now is if they start to copy all your mail from iOS/OS X Mail.app back to Apple for analysis. They'll probably have an API for "Send this chunk of unstructured data to the users's Apple Action Item processor" for external applications too.

I'd completely forgotten about the insane browser search tracking google now thing. That's another quintillion times creepy.

(Note: it's only creepy because Cloud Cloud Cloud. You're giving up control of your life to Cloud all Praise Cloud. No, you can't have the data. No, you can't run it on your own. No, you can't be private. Cloud Cloud Cloud.)

[wonderyak]

Obviously as someone that has never used Google Now, you wouldn't know this... but it acts on search data, not gmail data.

Its a normal app with normal settings (enter stocks you want to follow, enter sports teams, etc..) that takes some cues from what you search for once you've set up Google now.

Why the hell would Google want to display all the OLD data it has on you in an application called 'Now'?

[maxerickson]

I'm sure it uses email data. A friend emailed me flight information and it showed up on my tablet. They didn't use any of my computers to search on that flight (never mind that I have search history disabled).