Virtual Assistant, for Free

Would you like a (virtual) personal assistant? Not as a status symbol (obviously not, it’s virtual, who would see it?), but as someone that reminds you of that next item on your to-do list or how bad traffic is on the route you will be taking. Sure, you could search for all that info online, but what if the phone just “knows” what is relevant to you and shows it before you even ask? For free?

Mathew Ingram talked about such a service, Google Now, in his article titled “The Google Now dilemma: Yes, it’s kind of creepy — but it’s also incredibly useful”. So how does Google Now work?
“…it just collects a broad range of information about you and your activity from your search history, your calendar, your email, web services you are signed into, and so on, and then uses that to show you information that is relevant to what you are doing or where you happen to be.”

It does all this only if you give permission for the feature to activate: and unlike Facebook, the default setting is No. So what are some of the things it could do for you? A couple of examples would help understand:
1)      Using your mail or calendar, it figures out your next appointment. Using GPS, it knows where you are. Add Google Maps into the equation, and it knows what route you could take to get to that appointment. Combining all that with traffic details, and it can suggest you start earlier than planned!
2)     Using the booking details of your flight (in your mailbox), it internally queries about flight timings and tells you that your flight just got delayed by an hour.
3)     The GPS info says you are in a new city; so it pops up the list of tourist spots that you might want to visit. Along with the weather forecast.

Now obviously all this means Google is accessing a lot of your personal data. That, of course, raises concerns about misuse:
“Are there ways Google could use this information that I might not like? Of course there are. But I trust that Google is aware enough of the dangers — both legal and commercial — of engaging in that kind of behavior that they will avoid it.”

So Ingram’s assessment about the privacy v/s utility tradeoff?
“In return for providing some anonymized data and behavior patterns, I get access to a personalized assistant that is not only more unobtrusive than any human version would be, but is also faster and completely free. That’s a pretty good bargain.”

What’s your take? Good bargain or is it the slippery slope to losing all privacy?

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