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They know you've traveled to Europe, they know all the places you went and how long you were in each one. How is that not useful?

toomuchtodo 8y ago
They probably even know what carrier you used for your flight based on transit time between airports.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  Or just pull that information from the flight confirmation email that was sent to Gmail.
  - amatecha 8y ago
    Correct - they'll know your entire itinerary (and whoever else you traveled with) because of your hotel booking confirmations, too. Same with whatever events you bought tickets to. :)
  - joering2 8y ago
    From gmail they also have keys to yor website SSL, as majority of SSL cert providers will send those to admin email (form of verification that someone access admin/webmaster account) on file as form of validation (altho there are other options like CNAME in some providers)
    - jlgaddis 8y ago
      They might have a copy of the signed certificate that the CA sent you via e-mail, but they certainly should not have a copy of the private key that goes along with it (unless you did something stupid like let someone else generate the private key for you).
kinsomo 8y ago
>> Wow, they (Google) really keep everything.. They've still got my trip to Europe from 5 years ago on there, not sure how that's useful to them at this point haha. > They know you've traveled to Europe, they know all the places you went and how long you were in each one. How is that not useful? But how is deriving those facts from 5 year old location data actually useful to them? AFAIK, they don't try to drive "engagement" by inducing nostalgia with push notifications [1]. I don't really see the use of old data like that for ad-targeting beyond a coarse "travels internationally"-type categories that don't really require keeping the data around. [1] Remember when you were in Europe? Wasn't it fun? We were there too, following you. Please, please log on now to see what we tracked!
- majormajor 8y ago
  > AFAIK, they don't try to drive "engagement" by inducing nostalgia with push notifications [1]. They definitely do this with Google Photos "revisit this day" stuff, but it seems just an engagement play than a direct monetization one.
- jankassens 8y ago
  Did they go on a long distance vacation every year? They're probably a good target for travel ads. They're probably also in a higher income bracket then someone who's only going on local trips.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  They know you're wealthy enough to travel to Europe. They know you might buy airplane tickets. They can show you ads for other international destinations. If nothing else, they can sell ads against you for "Category: Travelled to X place within the last Y years".
  - netsharc 8y ago
    Thought experiment: your phone could know you liked a particular tourist spot because you spent a lot of time there, and later on when you upload pictures from your DSLR to Google Photos, the system will notice that there are a lot of photos that are timestamped within the time range when you were at that tourist spot. And data mining can tell that people who like that tourist spot A in country X also liked tourist spot B in city G in country Y a lot, so, tourism board of city G/country Y, here's a good target for your ad. And not just tourist stuff. Data mining might even tell they like a particular brand of, I don't know, yoghurt, so let's sell some of that yoghurt!

toomuchtodo 8y ago

They probably even know what carrier you used for your flight based on transit time between airports.

ReverseCold 8y ago
Or just pull that information from the flight confirmation email that was sent to Gmail.
- amatecha 8y ago
  Correct - they'll know your entire itinerary (and whoever else you traveled with) because of your hotel booking confirmations, too. Same with whatever events you bought tickets to. :)
- joering2 8y ago
  From gmail they also have keys to yor website SSL, as majority of SSL cert providers will send those to admin email (form of verification that someone access admin/webmaster account) on file as form of validation (altho there are other options like CNAME in some providers)
  - jlgaddis 8y ago
    They might have a copy of the signed certificate that the CA sent you via e-mail, but they certainly should not have a copy of the private key that goes along with it (unless you did something stupid like let someone else generate the private key for you).

kinsomo 8y ago

>> Wow, they (Google) really keep everything.. They've still got my trip to Europe from 5 years ago on there, not sure how that's useful to them at this point haha. > They know you've traveled to Europe, they know all the places you went and how long you were in each one. How is that not useful? But how is deriving those facts from 5 year old location data actually useful to them? AFAIK, they don't try to drive "engagement" by inducing nostalgia with push notifications [1]. I don't really see the use of old data like that for ad-targeting beyond a coarse "travels internationally"-type categories that don't really require keeping the data around. [1] Remember when you were in Europe? Wasn't it fun? We were there too, following you. Please, please log on now to see what we tracked!

majormajor 8y ago
> AFAIK, they don't try to drive "engagement" by inducing nostalgia with push notifications [1]. They definitely do this with Google Photos "revisit this day" stuff, but it seems just an engagement play than a direct monetization one.
jankassens 8y ago
Did they go on a long distance vacation every year? They're probably a good target for travel ads. They're probably also in a higher income bracket then someone who's only going on local trips.
ForHackernews 8y ago
They know you're wealthy enough to travel to Europe. They know you might buy airplane tickets. They can show you ads for other international destinations. If nothing else, they can sell ads against you for "Category: Travelled to X place within the last Y years".
- netsharc 8y ago
  Thought experiment: your phone could know you liked a particular tourist spot because you spent a lot of time there, and later on when you upload pictures from your DSLR to Google Photos, the system will notice that there are a lot of photos that are timestamped within the time range when you were at that tourist spot. And data mining can tell that people who like that tourist spot A in country X also liked tourist spot B in city G in country Y a lot, so, tourism board of city G/country Y, here's a good target for your ad. And not just tourist stuff. Data mining might even tell they like a particular brand of, I don't know, yoghurt, so let's sell some of that yoghurt!