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Re:Google in, Google out by TeMPOraL on Monday May 22, 2017 @03:19PM (#14396199)
Asking for weather is an API issue, it totally does not require uploading your voice.
Re:Google in, Google out by euyyn on Monday May 22, 2017 @06:28PM (#14397394)
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".
Re:Google in, Google out by TeMPOraL on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:35AM (#14398826)
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.
Re:Google in, Google out by pacala on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @10:51AM (#14401701)
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.

Re:Google in, Google out by fixermark on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:49PM (#14402823)
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.