Creepy, Less Creepy and Non-Creepy

Recently, my wife accidentally took my ATM card instead of hers to withdraw cash. As the SMS’s indicating the amounts withdrawn started coming in, I realized what had happened. Because multiple withdrawals of those amounts happened at the beginning of every month.

Pattern recognition is the name of the game. Google wants to use that for yet more uses of the smartphone. Here are a few examples of what might be coming next:
-         If you take lots of photos of nature, the next time you’re in a scenic location, the camera app would open automatically.
-         Or, as this site joked, that Health app might wag its finger at you if you hit the pizza joint for the third time that week.
-         Tired of remembering and entering those pesky passwords? Google is proposing an alternative:
“Instead of asking for a password, the phone might analyse your face, your voice, how you type, how you swipe, how you move and where you are.”

Does all that feel like Google knows you far too well for your comfort? Do you prefer Apple, a company that claims to value your privacy so much that it would fight the US government rather than give access to data you have on the iPhone?

On the other hand, would going the Apple way deprive you of so many useful features? After all, as Marco Arment says:
“It’s possible to build tons of useful services and smarts by just using public data, like the web, mapping databases, business directories, etc., without any access to or involvement from the user’s private data…. Google and others do these sorts of non-creepy or less-creepy services far better than Apple, too — not just the creepy ones.”

Creepy, less creepy and non-creepy: do you really want to throw away all those services at the altar of privacy?

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