This is getting off-topic but I’m amazed by this ability to reach out to computers around the world as a sensor array and infer things we can’t easily find out in other ways. It’s in popular culture and HN comments most often as spyware and mass surveillance of people, and that’s a bit of a shame.
GPS location and movement data is what gives Google maps its near-real-time view of traffic on all roads, and busy-ness of all shops.
I think they collect location data from people riding public transport so they can tell you how long people wait on average at bus stops before getting on a bus.
Does Google collect atmospheric pressure readings from phone altimeters and use it for weather models? Could they?
Kindle collects details on books people read, how far they read, where they stop, which sections they highlight and quote, which words they look up in dictionaries.
I wonder if anyone’s curated a list of things like this which do happen or have been tried, excluding the “gathers user data for advertising” category which would become the biggest one, drowning out everything else.
I think current phones use accelerometer data to detect possible car crashes and call emergency services. Google could use that in aggregate to identify accident blackspots but I don’t know if they do. But that would be less useful because the police already know everywhere a big accident happens because people call the police. So that’s data easily found a different way.
> It’s in popular culture and HN comments most often as spyware and mass surveillance of people, and that’s a bit of a shame.
I don't know whether you mean it's a shame that people consider it spyware, or if you meant that it's a shame that it manifests as spyware typically. I agree with the latter, not the former. It usually is spyware. If companies went for simple opt-in popups with a brief description of the reasoning, I'd be all for that. I sometimes opt-in to these requests myself, despite being a fairly privacy-conscious person, because I understand the benefit they have to the people collecting the data for good purposes. But when surveillance is opt-out (or no choice given), it's just spyware.
I mean what you did is a shame.
I asked to put the spyware aside for one sub-thread and focus on the astonishing worldwide sensor array, and you talked about the spyware and nothing else.
People don't want to be exploited for the greater good just because it's astonishing technology. That's why it always gets brought up.
Doesn’t Google also use the phone accelerometer to try and spot earthquakes?
I don't know, but that's a good one. I wonder if they could do something like LIGO [1] which is an experiment of shining LASERS on mirrors 4km apart, to detect gravitational waves. Phone accelerometers don't have that kind of precision, but there are hundreds of millions of them and they are thousands of miles apart, is there possibly a signal among that noise?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO