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Total aside, but kinda relevant. I lost my phone like a dufus about a two weeks ago. Battery died and I had no idea where it was. When I pulled the my google l
by RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
Total aside, but kinda relevant.
I lost my phone like a dufus about a two weeks ago. Battery died and I had no idea where it was. When I pulled the my google location history, it was too coarse to tell me anything other than 'at your house'. However, I was able to pull the raw data from google and post process it by time stamp into a series of rasters that were fine enough for me to see that the phone was definitely in the bedroom/ bathroom area. After processing my data, finding my phone took all of a minute.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThis is interesting. By the raw data you mean from Google Takeout, or something else? Did you have to filter/smooth the data points?
- machinesmachine 7y agoAlso interested. Could you describe the process?
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoSure. I pulled my data in the standard takeout.google.com/ process. The result is a json (? iirc). I parsed the json into x, y, and rasterized it using gdal. https://imgur.com/a/ZhyTsDV https://imgur.com/a/ZhyTsDV See I wasn't sure if I lost it in the couch in the living room, the office, or the bedroom. This got me within a few feet.
- icelancer 7y agoHa, this is an awesome use of the data. What a cool plot showing the "density" of pings.
- crazygringo 7y agoThat's amazing, so cool. Is that something Google's not doing with the data, but could? (E.g. they don't because their maps don't show most houses precisely enough or whatever, so it wouldn't be useful?) Or is it relying on the fact that you are triangulating or similar from the known exact position of your WiFi routers or similar down to the inch, and Google doesn't have any way of knowing that?
- Phlarp 7y agoOr they do and have internally assessed that it would be too creepy to provide to users, but are happily using it to better target advertising.
- HALtheWise 7y agoOr they have decided that it's too creepy to use at all, so they don't use it for targeted advertising. Seriously, why does everyone assume that companies are evilly cackling in volcano lairs? They know that violating user trust is really expensive and a bad idea. By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen that Google's advertising targeting is only allowed to use "neighborhood level" location, which is designed to be coarse enough to not allow specifying individual people.
- Phlarp 7y agoBecause time and time again it is proven that "these companies" (Facebook and Google) will use any signal they can get their hands on to make money? I'm pretty sure they've both been caught with their hands in the cookie jar doing things they swore they never would.
- LordDragonfang 7y agoGenuinely curious, could you provide an example of Google "doing things they swore they never would" with consumer data? Because I know they do plenty of things with data that people think are creepy, but I don't recall ever seeing a story about them doing things they swore they wouldn't (besides the nebulous "don't be evil") or even lying about what they were actually doing with consumer data. If it's happened time and time again, it should be easy to pull up a source, right?
- close04 7y agoRandom example: when Chrome logged you in the browser without any warning, because you logged in to Gmail it also swiftly synced your local data (like browsing history) to your Google profile. That’s akin to stealing your data and I think at some point they must have promised not to do it...
- gricardo99 7y agoThis is pretty cool, but I'm still confused on what data you used. By my data, do you mean data from Google Android Device Configuration Service? If you're logged into Chrome or GSuite tools from desktop locations, I just wonder how useful the data from those other products would be, if it even has location data. I'm downloading my data archive to check it out...
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoI think its https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ where I got the data. Then its just a json which is relatively easy to parse.
- jdironman 7y agoProbably just looked at the last data point depending on the type of data was available. If its longitude / latitude values then its going to be pretty precise, although I would also like to know where to pull more granular data.
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoThe GPS receiver isnt' sufficiently accurate for one point to be useful, but in aggregate, it was accurate 'enough'. So although the numerical precision is pretty high, the actual accuracy is pretty low, I think I pulled all the points from 2am-6pm in the final time stamp to figure out where the phone was.
- nerpderp82 7y agoEnvious, nay jealous of a room of that size.
- lawrenceyan 7y agoPoint clouds save the day!
- rmorey 7y agoThis rules, thanks for sharing!
- raxxorrax 7y agoProbably slower than just keep searching. But way cooler.
- hugi 7y agoPlot twist: That's actually the queen and she lost the phone in Windsor Palace.
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoWell, I looked for a week-ish, and was fap-all out of ideas where it was. I was at the point where I was looking in ridiculous locations (freezer, garage, washing machine, garden, tool shed). This took about 20 minutes to hack together, and I found the phone in 10 minutes of looking in the 'right' spot. My phone had fallen behind the bedside stand and found a way to balance itself between the bed and the baseboards. The bed post is ~phone width, so even looking, you just couldnt see it. That being said, I work in the geospatial sciences doing geospatial data processing, so 20 minutes for me may not be 20 minutes for some one else.
- raxxorrax 7y ago> freezer Yeah, I have these moments too. Could be a good disinfectant for keys, I guess.