12 ms·

I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the

by pgrote 6y ago

I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy, but I see value in the way they use the data to show me information.

rwc 6y ago
Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience. I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged. Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy. When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply
  - bestnameever 6y ago
    Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud. > It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud. > https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
    - bilal4hmed 6y ago
      awesome, thanks for sharing.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  > but also for the betterment of their advertising products I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it? I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life (that mystery box company). Maybe if everything advertised to me was that interesting (to me), it would be a net win for everyone?
  - dagnabbit 6y ago
    Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising. Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong. HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.
    - ieatbutt 6y ago
      Wow you are so "woke"! Intellect level 10m
    - tsco77 6y ago
      Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department. Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on. All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - stickfigure 6y ago
        The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct. I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.
Someone1234 6y ago
You can get similar functionality by mapping the pictures you've taken using their coordinate metadata. Google is even working on this for Google Photos: https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/ https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/ In general, I think "privacy as a right" is a better approach for society. If people want to opt out of privacy, they should have that ability, but that should be a choice.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oefrha 6y ago
  Not everyone snaps a selfie every time they go to the bathroom, so no, a lot of us can’t get the same functionality by mapping photos. That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    You have a very narrow view of how people use smartphone cameras. Want to remember your e.g. hotel room number, parking garage floor/zone, or bus stop? Snap. Backup your plane ticket? Snap it. Record the wiring before an upgrade? Snap. To input your dietary nutrition later? Food picture. Part/model number? That's a picture. See behind something? Etc, etc. The fact you only think smartphone cameras are for "bathroom selfies" (?) says more about you than whomever you're trying to disparage, because you're obviously under-utilizing an extremely valuable tool in your pocket because you've put it into a tiny box and dismissed it.
    - oefrha 6y ago
      “Bathroom selfies” is just a tongue-in-cheek way to refer to frequent photo takers. If you’re somehow offended, I apologize, what the hell. I don’t need to remember my hotel room number or parking garage zone or bus stop every day. Even when I do I don’t need a photo, sorry, got a pretty good memory, and a digital notebook too. Under-utilize, sure, whatever, it’s my fucking phone and I didn’t ask you to judge. The fact is me and a whole host of people I know who don’t snap photos frequently enough (yeah, been talking to quite some friends about how we’ve basically been spending a fair bit of money on cameras that we don’t use very much) won’t get “the same functionality” as you were claiming, so I hope you’re not on a design panel for something like this where people who don’t conform to your expected usage pattern just get a FU. Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?
hateful 6y ago
I also like this feature - it's never been a problem for me. What is the problem is the data that they keep that I don't easily know about. I may be wrong, but this article sounds to me like it's going to delete the data you use so they don't have to store it (saving space) not the analytics data that they use to show you targeted advertisements.
- tylerhou 6y ago
  While deleting data does save space, one 10-minute YouTube video is far bigger than a few years of browsing history. Google isn't turning auto-delete for storage reasons. YouTube watch data is used to personalize recommendations, and browsing data is used to personalize ads: https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect. Disclaimer: I work at Google.
  - diegoperini 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing.
  - adrianhel 6y ago
    Can I consent to permanent storage somewhere? I love using the timeline in Google Maps!
    - tylerhou 6y ago
      Yes, in “my activity.” https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols The location history setting toggles whether data for My Timeline is kept.
  - machinehermit 6y ago
    I just don't get how Youtube recommendations are so bad. So often it recommends me things I have already watched. Or the algorithm knows I like David Bowie so recommends me "Changes". The most boring possible recommendation it can give to a David Bowie fan. I really wish it had a setting to up the daring of the recommendation. It seems designed to just never recommend something that I would really hate but in doing so it never recommends me anything all that interesting.
_bxg1 6y ago
iOS remembers that stuff too. It just stores it device-side and doesn't use it for advertising. Edit: Turns out it doesn't actually provide a location history visualization like GMaps does - it only shows "significant locations" - but to my knowledge there's no technical reason it couldn't do so
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  You don't have to save all the user's location data to a central server for the local device to remember your common navigation request endpoints. You don't have to send any data to a central server at all.
Lendal 6y ago
Yeah, Timeline is the only thing that I find useful and wish to keep forever. Other people use photos to remember places they've been. I use Timeline. I like it because it works all the time. I rarely take selfies, because Timeline does it for me. I don't even have to take the phone out of my pocket when I'm tourist-ing.
kawfey 6y ago
I think the minority opinion is those who don't like this. This group is much more vocal about their privacy, while the other group is either okay with it or blissfully ignorant. I do prefer an opt-in default though, because the blissfully ignorant shouldn't have to bear such a responsibility. I too really like this data, specifically location history. It's come in extremely handy for a number of reasons, whether finding a restaurant I really liked but forgot the name of, finding exact dates and times when I was in certain places (which is handy to know if said place had a COVID-19 outbreak, for example).
NoodleIncident 6y ago
Even with their infinite retention, I've been annoyed recently at YouTube recommending videos I've already watched. Without the red bar beneath the thumbnail, I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever...
- darkerside 6y ago
  If they delete your data, it's likely that still happens, just without the red bar...
- gruez 6y ago
  >I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever... sounds like a feature (for them) to me. why bother showing your users new videos when they're perfectly content watching the same old videos over and over again? Better than not showing anything and them leaving your site because there's no more relevant/new videos.
  - autoexec 6y ago
    Seriously. It's not like people don't rewatch things all the time. They already know you liked the video enough to sit through the whole thing and it costs them nothing to suggest it again.
- canada_dry 6y ago
  Try this... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-watchmarker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-watch...
ashtonkem 6y ago
The historical problem with a lot of these companies hasn’t been whether or not they keep data, but the lack of transparency and control given to end users about what data they keep and what it’s used for. You should be allowed to make trade offs between privacy and convenience where it’s available, but it should be transparent exactly what tradeoff you’re making.
chongli 6y ago
In the old days of the web, before CSS became widespread, all links were blue by default and turned purple when visited. Back then people would also bookmark things and organize their bookmarks. Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.
- rnotaro 6y ago
  Parent is talking about physical location. https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline
- zaat 6y ago
  While I'm preety deep in the camp of those who don't want or let google save their history, I didn't stop caring about managing my own information, I just gave up. The amount of info I'm processing today is on a different scale than it used to be on the good old days, and the tools we have - browser history for instance - just didn't scale.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    I wish we had a middle ground between browser history and favourites - just a way to preferentially find something I’ve visited and tagged before by keyword that works in the address bar. “What was the name of that one article Among hundreds from 3 months ago about X...”
    - hk__2 6y ago
      Something like Pinboard? https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
      - freehunter 6y ago
        Pinboard is a bookmarking solution, not a middle ground between bookmarks and browser history.
cheez 6y ago
Google maps timeline allowed me to remain free. Though I explicitly opted into it for this reason.
gentleman11 6y ago
I would like it if only it was opt in, temporary, and the data usage was strictly limited in scope. I only ever find that combination in open source
spaetzleesser 6y ago
The feature is fine by itself and potentially very useful. But it’s not good if that data is mined and sold for profit without the user knowing what’s happening. For example if I could set up it in a way that the data is streamed into a database I control access to, things would be great.
megamindbrian2 6y ago
Not minority. I love this stuff too, I can find project links I saved years ago by searching my own history. I like Timeline on Google maps and seeing where I've been. Check out the movie The Circle.
tick_tock_tick 6y ago
I always find it fascinating when you show up at a restaurants and google says you were last here 4 years ago.
7ewis 6y ago
Honestly, I agree with you. I believe we should have control over our own data, and it looks like Google is giving us that. So I'm glad we can choose to enable/disable this ourselves.
amelius 6y ago
> I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy (...) There is no trade off because you can have both! It's just that Google doesn't offer this.
favokus 6y ago
I am very privacy focused and I do like this feature. I like it so much that I've cobbled together a bunch of tools to do essentially the same thing without relying on Google. I have a program on my phone that is always running and capturing my location and saving it to gpx files in a specific folder. That folder is synced to my desktop (directly over SyncThing), and I can evaluate the files easily with Python to see where I've been at any given time. I usually don't do anything with the gpx files, but there have been situations where I needed to know how long I was in a particular place over a longer period of time (for work) where it was incredibly useful to have the data. One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet). I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.
- notagoodidea 6y ago
  One way to do it will be to get OpenStreetMap at least the road and path database. The quality of it vary at lot by cities/countries. The easy way, is to set a reasonable buffer for you GPX points (dunno, let's say 10m at least) and check if they intersect with the roads/path/street they connect to. It is a bit like your way of filtering (and probably a bit like Google must do it : Check around infrastructure and filter based on the probability to be on that road/path/poi between the two points before and after.) If you want to go the extra miles, I remember this talk of Ilya Zverev "Hundred thousand rides a day"[1] seen at FOSDEM 2019. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces...
fsckboy 6y ago
You know what computers can do for us if Google wanted to respect the spirit of Asimov's First Law? They could do all the things you like with your data while NOT doing want you don't like. You wouldn't be in the minority if you thought of it this way.

by pgrote 6y ago

rwc 6y ago

Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience. I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged. Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy. When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.

bilal4hmed 6y ago
Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply
- bestnameever 6y ago
  Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud. > It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud. > https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
  - bilal4hmed 6y ago
    awesome, thanks for sharing.
stickfigure 6y ago
> but also for the betterment of their advertising products I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it? I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life (that mystery box company). Maybe if everything advertised to me was that interesting (to me), it would be a net win for everyone?
- dagnabbit 6y ago
  Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising. Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong. HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.
  - ieatbutt 6y ago
    Wow you are so "woke"! Intellect level 10m
  - tsco77 6y ago
    Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department. Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on. All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct. I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.

Someone1234 6y ago

You can get similar functionality by mapping the pictures you've taken using their coordinate metadata. Google is even working on this for Google Photos: https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/ https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/ In general, I think "privacy as a right" is a better approach for society. If people want to opt out of privacy, they should have that ability, but that should be a choice.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
oefrha 6y ago
Not everyone snaps a selfie every time they go to the bathroom, so no, a lot of us can’t get the same functionality by mapping photos. That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  You have a very narrow view of how people use smartphone cameras. Want to remember your e.g. hotel room number, parking garage floor/zone, or bus stop? Snap. Backup your plane ticket? Snap it. Record the wiring before an upgrade? Snap. To input your dietary nutrition later? Food picture. Part/model number? That's a picture. See behind something? Etc, etc. The fact you only think smartphone cameras are for "bathroom selfies" (?) says more about you than whomever you're trying to disparage, because you're obviously under-utilizing an extremely valuable tool in your pocket because you've put it into a tiny box and dismissed it.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    “Bathroom selfies” is just a tongue-in-cheek way to refer to frequent photo takers. If you’re somehow offended, I apologize, what the hell. I don’t need to remember my hotel room number or parking garage zone or bus stop every day. Even when I do I don’t need a photo, sorry, got a pretty good memory, and a digital notebook too. Under-utilize, sure, whatever, it’s my fucking phone and I didn’t ask you to judge. The fact is me and a whole host of people I know who don’t snap photos frequently enough (yeah, been talking to quite some friends about how we’ve basically been spending a fair bit of money on cameras that we don’t use very much) won’t get “the same functionality” as you were claiming, so I hope you’re not on a design panel for something like this where people who don’t conform to your expected usage pattern just get a FU. Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?

hateful 6y ago

I also like this feature - it's never been a problem for me. What is the problem is the data that they keep that I don't easily know about. I may be wrong, but this article sounds to me like it's going to delete the data you use so they don't have to store it (saving space) not the analytics data that they use to show you targeted advertisements.

tylerhou 6y ago
While deleting data does save space, one 10-minute YouTube video is far bigger than a few years of browsing history. Google isn't turning auto-delete for storage reasons. YouTube watch data is used to personalize recommendations, and browsing data is used to personalize ads: https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect. Disclaimer: I work at Google.
- diegoperini 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing.
- adrianhel 6y ago
  Can I consent to permanent storage somewhere? I love using the timeline in Google Maps!
  - tylerhou 6y ago
    Yes, in “my activity.” https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols The location history setting toggles whether data for My Timeline is kept.
- machinehermit 6y ago
  I just don't get how Youtube recommendations are so bad. So often it recommends me things I have already watched. Or the algorithm knows I like David Bowie so recommends me "Changes". The most boring possible recommendation it can give to a David Bowie fan. I really wish it had a setting to up the daring of the recommendation. It seems designed to just never recommend something that I would really hate but in doing so it never recommends me anything all that interesting.

_bxg1 6y ago

iOS remembers that stuff too. It just stores it device-side and doesn't use it for advertising. Edit: Turns out it doesn't actually provide a location history visualization like GMaps does - it only shows "significant locations" - but to my knowledge there's no technical reason it couldn't do so

GeekyBear 6y ago
You don't have to save all the user's location data to a central server for the local device to remember your common navigation request endpoints. You don't have to send any data to a central server at all.

Lendal 6y ago

Yeah, Timeline is the only thing that I find useful and wish to keep forever. Other people use photos to remember places they've been. I use Timeline. I like it because it works all the time. I rarely take selfies, because Timeline does it for me. I don't even have to take the phone out of my pocket when I'm tourist-ing.

kawfey 6y ago

I think the minority opinion is those who don't like this. This group is much more vocal about their privacy, while the other group is either okay with it or blissfully ignorant. I do prefer an opt-in default though, because the blissfully ignorant shouldn't have to bear such a responsibility. I too really like this data, specifically location history. It's come in extremely handy for a number of reasons, whether finding a restaurant I really liked but forgot the name of, finding exact dates and times when I was in certain places (which is handy to know if said place had a COVID-19 outbreak, for example).

NoodleIncident 6y ago

Even with their infinite retention, I've been annoyed recently at YouTube recommending videos I've already watched. Without the red bar beneath the thumbnail, I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever...

darkerside 6y ago
If they delete your data, it's likely that still happens, just without the red bar...
gruez 6y ago
>I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever... sounds like a feature (for them) to me. why bother showing your users new videos when they're perfectly content watching the same old videos over and over again? Better than not showing anything and them leaving your site because there's no more relevant/new videos.
- autoexec 6y ago
  Seriously. It's not like people don't rewatch things all the time. They already know you liked the video enough to sit through the whole thing and it costs them nothing to suggest it again.
canada_dry 6y ago
Try this... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-watchmarker/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-watch...

ashtonkem 6y ago

The historical problem with a lot of these companies hasn’t been whether or not they keep data, but the lack of transparency and control given to end users about what data they keep and what it’s used for. You should be allowed to make trade offs between privacy and convenience where it’s available, but it should be transparent exactly what tradeoff you’re making.

chongli 6y ago

In the old days of the web, before CSS became widespread, all links were blue by default and turned purple when visited. Back then people would also bookmark things and organize their bookmarks. Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.

rnotaro 6y ago
Parent is talking about physical location. https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline
zaat 6y ago
While I'm preety deep in the camp of those who don't want or let google save their history, I didn't stop caring about managing my own information, I just gave up. The amount of info I'm processing today is on a different scale than it used to be on the good old days, and the tools we have - browser history for instance - just didn't scale.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  I wish we had a middle ground between browser history and favourites - just a way to preferentially find something I’ve visited and tagged before by keyword that works in the address bar. “What was the name of that one article Among hundreds from 3 months ago about X...”
  - hk__2 6y ago
    Something like Pinboard? https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
    - freehunter 6y ago
      Pinboard is a bookmarking solution, not a middle ground between bookmarks and browser history.

cheez 6y ago

Google maps timeline allowed me to remain free. Though I explicitly opted into it for this reason.

gentleman11 6y ago

I would like it if only it was opt in, temporary, and the data usage was strictly limited in scope. I only ever find that combination in open source

spaetzleesser 6y ago

The feature is fine by itself and potentially very useful. But it’s not good if that data is mined and sold for profit without the user knowing what’s happening. For example if I could set up it in a way that the data is streamed into a database I control access to, things would be great.

megamindbrian2 6y ago

Not minority. I love this stuff too, I can find project links I saved years ago by searching my own history. I like Timeline on Google maps and seeing where I've been. Check out the movie The Circle.

tick_tock_tick 6y ago

I always find it fascinating when you show up at a restaurants and google says you were last here 4 years ago.

7ewis 6y ago

Honestly, I agree with you. I believe we should have control over our own data, and it looks like Google is giving us that. So I'm glad we can choose to enable/disable this ourselves.

amelius 6y ago

> I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy (...) There is no trade off because you can have both! It's just that Google doesn't offer this.

favokus 6y ago

I am very privacy focused and I do like this feature. I like it so much that I've cobbled together a bunch of tools to do essentially the same thing without relying on Google. I have a program on my phone that is always running and capturing my location and saving it to gpx files in a specific folder. That folder is synced to my desktop (directly over SyncThing), and I can evaluate the files easily with Python to see where I've been at any given time. I usually don't do anything with the gpx files, but there have been situations where I needed to know how long I was in a particular place over a longer period of time (for work) where it was incredibly useful to have the data. One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet). I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.

notagoodidea 6y ago
One way to do it will be to get OpenStreetMap at least the road and path database. The quality of it vary at lot by cities/countries. The easy way, is to set a reasonable buffer for you GPX points (dunno, let's say 10m at least) and check if they intersect with the roads/path/street they connect to. It is a bit like your way of filtering (and probably a bit like Google must do it : Check around infrastructure and filter based on the probability to be on that road/path/poi between the two points before and after.) If you want to go the extra miles, I remember this talk of Ilya Zverev "Hundred thousand rides a day"[1] seen at FOSDEM 2019. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces...

fsckboy 6y ago

You know what computers can do for us if Google wanted to respect the spirit of Asimov's First Law? They could do all the things you like with your data while NOT doing want you don't like. You wouldn't be in the minority if you thought of it this way.