Where Have You Been?

Todd Humphreys gave this TED talk where he said that something happened on May 2nd, 2000 that changed the world dramatically. No, not overnight; but within a decade as smartphones took over the world. So what was that event?
“On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.”
Pretty soon, GPS accuracy got even better:
“With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street.”

Fast forward to present day when GPS and Big Data come together.

Recently, Google launched a new feature called Your Timeline. If you use Google Maps, the feature lets you “view the places you’ve been on a given day, month or year”. One site described it as “terrifyingly cool but terrifyingly scary”. The feature is private and only visible to you. Google says the service allows users to delete specific days or specific locations if they want to.

But all of that is for now. How long it will be before Google “offers a way for multiple people to compare location histories and identify dates and places where paths have crossed”, asks Thomas Ricker. It’s easy to imagine “dystopian outcomes” whenever that happens. But here’s a positive one, says Ricker:
“Imagine a future where wedding invites arrive decorated with GIFs showing a couple’s divergent location histories merging to form a single path. Created automatically by Google Photos, of course, complete with slideshow.”

Awww…that would be so romantic. If it weren’t also so terrifying scary.

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