I don't ask for those things anyway, precisely because I don't want Google to have that much information about me. I'd love to have a local-only, offline map system.

You can pretty much get that right now by buying any one of the fine Garmin navigational products on the market, right?

Well, that makes it not a "Star Trek-esque voice-activated computer interaction", which is the point of it.

Asking for weather is an API issue, it totally does not require uploading your voice.

It requires uploading where you are. And it requires uploading the voice for processing if you want it to distinguish "what's the weather today" from "tonight", "tomorrow", "this weekend at <place X>", or "back at home".

In theory, voice processing could be done locally, and then you'd only have to upload coordinates and/or place name, just as every non-voice weather app.

You could easily anonymize the location up to, for example, a 50x50 miles rectangle. Or you could state in your EULA "we don't keep the location your device sends to our servers for more than 30 minutes."

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Neither of those changes would leave the data in much of a state to improve the product. For example, the fine-grained location data is fed back into flow-analysis to determine if there's a traffic jam on roads that aren't monitored by other systems (like highway traffic counters).

https://www.ncta.com/platform/broadband-internet/how-google-...

This sort of data cross-pollination is done all over the place in the Google software ecosystem. It's not that it's easier to collect the data than not; it's that Google software literally wouldn't be as effective without the massive amounts of data it has access to analyze across use cases.