> ... it was creepy as all hell that the people [...] knew enough about me

No people know. Software metaphorically ‘knows’, but don't anthropomorphize it (it hates that).

But it's accessible to people, that's the issue. Not my tech, but systems far away that belong to others.

Exactly. You're expected to naively trust 'the algorithm', because people are nowhere to be found near your supposedly anonymized data.

Speaking of which, anyone following today's stories about the Yahoo email scandal, the pressure on the folks who own Signal, and recent litigation from Microsoft against government gag orders?

But, let's go back to talking about none of us have free will and talking about how clever Now is.

Failing to provide local history is essentially one of the dark patterns to getting you to turn on their privacy collection. Most things Google requires it for could easily be done outside the cloud, but by making things depend on the cloud, and then telling everyone you can only do it with the cloud, you convince people that they need the cloud. When in reality, they never did.

GPS navigation devices with much less storage than a phone have been more than capable of what Google Maps offers for a long time. There's essentially no reason for it to do anything with the Internet except getting map updates.

And traffic.

I use Google Maps every single day to get to and from work, simply because it knows how to avoid traffic. 10% of the time it saves me half an hour on my commute.