We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13013699 and marked it off-topic.

You do know you could be on your way to a poor country to help sick people there right now? Don't you care about sick people dying? You could have prevented several death of loving fathers and mothers by now, and - let's not forget - their children! Instead, you decided to post this. Are you a terrorist?

Reminds me of that joke about U2 singer Bono. At a U2 concert in Glasgow, Scotland, Bono asked the audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his hands, once every few seconds. Holding the audience in total silence, he said into the microphone, "Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies." From the front of the crowd a voice with a broad Scottish accent pierced the quiet … "Well, fuckin stop doin it then, ya evil bastard!"

Of course I'd prevent it, and of course it means everything. I'm just saying that it's incredibly easy for terrorists to identify, without the help of Google at all, specific areas where humans congregate in greater numbers in order to increase the casualty count when their aim to to do so. Hence many terrorist atrocities that have already occurred have done so in places like airports, train stations, music/sports venues etc.

Moreover, these are venues with serious capacity and are unlikely to be the kind of places where users of Google's new service will look for. They're more likely to want to know, "Is my favourite downtown bar busy?" which might represent a few hundred people at most, whereas the average sports stadium is always busy when a game is on, and holds significantly larger numbers of people.

Surely the opportunity costs of attacking an unsecured crowded bar over a secured sports stadium are favored toward an unsecured bar.

Recently there were posts here concerning unethical practices in software development.

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/the-code-im-still-ashamed-of...

Google somehow gets a pass on these practices for some reason. They have a lot of power and influence over the things they decide to do with the information they are volunteered. I think they should be cautious with releasing real time data on where people are congregating.

Might as well close down all bars, airports, concert venues and any public transportation. Just imagine how many deaths we could prevent.

In an absolute sense you're not going to prevent any deaths unless you're preventing lives. Everybody alive is going to die.

One less death relative to what?

Should all large gatherings of people (festivals, music concerts, sporting events) cease all advertising and promotion out of terror?