> Hell, look at this very thread on HN. There are people further upthread essentially saying, "Whatever, I like it because it's convenient."
Is that so ridiculous a concept? People routinely trade privacy for convenience.
Sending my location to Google through their maps is ridiculously convenient. Getting around using public transportation, especially in a city I'm unfamiliar with, would be a pretty awful experience without it.
While it's a small convenience, Gmail parsing my airline confirmation emails into an easy-to-read format is pretty cool, and I like that it's done. To do this (and have a spam filter), they must be parsing my private email in some capacity.
I've personally never been a fan of digital personal assistants. I've only used Google Now and found it more annoying than effective. But I can certainly understand why getting up-to-date traffic information when you're about to drive home from work would be a really useful thing to have. To do that, it has to learn your daily habits.
Convenience and privacy are almost always at odds with each other. It's a give and take, so ideally I should be getting more convenience for whatever privacy I'm giving up. That may not be the case here, and I'm not saying where your personal line should be, but don't assume people are ignorant just because they're choosing convenience over privacy. (Not saying you are personally, but others in this thread are.)
Yeah, I don't really think of people with different priorities as "ignorant". I get that there are tradeoffs, it's the same deal with network security.
I'm a little ... frustrated, disappointed, bothered? ... though at the number of people that don't seem to consider at all the consequences of where information systems are headed. It's one thing to look at the benefits and the consequences and say, "OK, I'm willing to trade information on my position in exchange for realtime updated traffic flows and generally perfect maps and directions and nearby points of interest." I totally get that. It's not a choice I've made -- I remember getting around before GPS was everywhere -- but I can shrug and empathize and understand the decision.
But, "meh, I don't really care about this news, I just want more convenience" ... that bothers me a bit.
Unfortunately, I really can't think of any way to convince anyone else they should be bothered. I could cite historical cases where that hasn't worked out so well, I could dream up fictional scenarios where it might not work out so well, I could point to more recent events where things like identity theft are costing some people years of their life to sort out. But, none of that really makes much of an impact. I don't think anybody who isn't bothered now will become bothered up until it affects them directly.
>>Is that so ridiculous a concept? People routinely trade privacy for convenience. Sending my location to Google through their maps is ridiculously convenient.
If you cannot tell the difference between you sending your location to Google when you need to and half the people in the world sending ALL their information to Microsoft ALL the time BY DEFAULT, I don't know what to tell you.
Did you stop reading after those three sentences? Because I talked about digital assistants and Google Now, which is basically sending all your information to Google all the time.
Why does convenience and privacy have to contradict each other?
Parsing airline confirmations should be possible to do offline. Preferably by some standard data format like iCal but even if airlines can't agree on such a format it shouldn't be difficult to compile a scraper that can be run offline, with an updater that contains all the various formats.
Sending your location should not be required to display a dot on a map of where you are. Even navigation can be done offline to a certain extent, OsmAnd does it and that's what tomtom and cars have been doing for years.
Is that so ridiculous a concept? People routinely trade privacy for convenience.
Sending my location to Google through their maps is ridiculously convenient. Getting around using public transportation, especially in a city I'm unfamiliar with, would be a pretty awful experience without it.
While it's a small convenience, Gmail parsing my airline confirmation emails into an easy-to-read format is pretty cool, and I like that it's done. To do this (and have a spam filter), they must be parsing my private email in some capacity.
I've personally never been a fan of digital personal assistants. I've only used Google Now and found it more annoying than effective. But I can certainly understand why getting up-to-date traffic information when you're about to drive home from work would be a really useful thing to have. To do that, it has to learn your daily habits.
Convenience and privacy are almost always at odds with each other. It's a give and take, so ideally I should be getting more convenience for whatever privacy I'm giving up. That may not be the case here, and I'm not saying where your personal line should be, but don't assume people are ignorant just because they're choosing convenience over privacy. (Not saying you are personally, but others in this thread are.)