Google on the other hand is like the road. You can't avoid the road.
My friends often upload pictures of me, tagged with GPS coordinates and user; And even though most have stopped tagging me (as I have asked), Facebook often does offer them to tag me, which means that Facebook has enough pictures of me to identify me in random pictures (even though I never uploaded a single one myself).
Google collects information from users themselves, and have some info from people mailing them (if you are not on google yourself, it's likely more than half your emails are still coming or going to a google server).
But Facebook has co-opted your friends and family to spy on you, all day every day. Very much big brother.
>When you turn off tag suggestions, Facebook won’t suggest that people tag you in photos that look like you.
Otherwise, how would they know it looks like you?
Facebook probably uses more than just facial recognition, it can also use the metadata. They know who uploaded it, so they can narrow down the "list of candidate faces" from 7 billion to the much smaller number of people your friend knows/tags people in photos.
I've logged into Facebook in incognito mode for the last decade. It's really not that difficult to avoid doing this. By contrast, I might visit a dozen different Google services over the course of the day, their apps are a lot more indispensable (mobile web Maps is no fun), etc so it's a lot higher effort to do so for them.
A New "History": Irresistible by Adam Alter (2017) https://amzn.com/dp/1594206643/
Your Recommendation: Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll (2014) https://amzn.com/dp/0691160880
A lot of other European countries have automated toll roads (sometimes just for HGVs) which do the same thing.
So that's good at least
http://www.traffic-wales.com/?lang=en-GB
Just filter the map by CCTV and choose the icon to view the live video.
Enjoy!
https://trafiken.nu/goteborg/Kameror/Alla-Kameror/
http://www.webbkameror.se/trafikkameror/trafikkameror_kalm_1...
Also...
https://www.wired.com/2010/12/swedish-speed-camera-pays-driv...
* Using DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/). It is really decent and has good desktop and mobile integration.
* Using a browser like Brave (https://www.brave.com/) that blocks trackers etc. Android app is superb.
* Using a Maps replacement like OSM (https://www.openstreetmap.org) on desktop and OsmAnd on mobile (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.osmand)
* Pay in cash, or pay using pre-paid credit cards that you change every couple of months.
* For real paranoia, get a VPN app and pick a new country & server every day.
Email is harder if you are emailing people who use gmail. For what it is worth, as of June 2017 gmail no longer scans email content for ads (in both commercial and consumer/free gmail - https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...) Personally I use my inbox as my calendar - dont think you're missing much by just not using calendar at all unless you have a very, very hectic schedule.
I deleted my facebook account many years ago. I've not missed it.
As well as anything local. If you search for a fairly common venue name, google will always get you a much better result.
I have the opposite experience regarding programming questions though. I thought that part of the initial appeal of DDG was that it handled queries that involved syntax or symbols better. I suppose these types of queries may not be that "complex" though. I admit I often query just to verify the API or to check how to do a common task in a language I am less familiar with.
IIRC they won't if you search via !g on ddg.
Some people work better with reference documentation, books and their brain than SO "answers".
Google for "complex programming questions" is laughable and honestly a bit insulting to the profession.
That is also laughable and more than a bit insulting:
- most of the answers (I encountered) are in fact proper and correct answers because bascially it's a peer-reviewed environment, so no need for those snarky quatation marks. I, and many others, have spent hours and hours writing down good answers, and learning quite a bit while doing so.
- DDG/Google/... know about SO so it is often possible to get these answers way faster than when using the reference documentation, and your brain cannot change much about it
- you'll find answers which are nowhere to be found in the reference documentation - I assume your point is that with enough reference documentation and thinking any complex programming problem can be tackled. Well, yeah I guess, but it takes way more time than needed and anecdotally I have seen code written by people thinking that and it was one horrid mess. Mostly because stuff like 'good practices' and insight in design principles and patterns and whatnot isn't found in reference documentation. While via frequenting SO (and similar, before that existed) you pick up this stuff automatically and it makes you reflect on programming which in turn makes you better. If you use your brain, that is.
I find it laughable that you think there is something wrong with looking for resources relating to complex programming questions. I can't tell you how many times Googling a niche and complex problem instantly solved my issue. Sometimes SO is the only site that has fixes for bugs in the program you're using or mistakes in the documentation.
For framework configuration questions just search Stack(Overflow|Exchange) directly. For local results append the name of your city.
If you open an incognito window for all your searches, do not signin and close it right after, search engine will not associate your searches with you.
This is not enough to protect you from an evil company or government, but will affect which ads are presented to you, your search results, and should prevent your name from being associated with those searches should that search company date be compromised.
Lately I've been wondering whether I should withdraw most of my money from the bank. Any serious drawback to that approach? For one, I don't like my transactions being tracked and two, find it outrageous I have to pay various fees to use/access my money while it is used to enrich others.
You should be quite able to find a bank or credit union that will hold your money without charging a fee. Where are you?
You can still use cash to avoid tracking, and you can even thwart forensics by making regular uniform withdrawals. The neat thing is that patterning like this makes you less susceptible to analysis but far more susceptible to getting mugged because now we know that you pull $400 every Tuesday at 3pm. Pick your poison.
Where are you banking? My bank pays me interest, even on my checking account, and I don't need to worry about a burglar taking all my savings. There's no reason you can't keep your money at the bank, stop using credit cards, and pay everything in cash; all the bank will know is that you withdraw $200 every week.
https://microg.org/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12864429
The important part of that sentence is "for ads". Obviously, they don't do antispam out of thin air, they still have to scan email for it.
For instance I got an email earlier confirming a cancellation due to illness. It suggested I respond 'Thank you for your understanding'.
That's some quite good natural language stuff running on every email, presumably building a model.
Facebook on the other hand provides absolutely nothing of value to anyone really. The entirety of their service can be replaced with an IRC client and a free image host. The walled garden they have cultivated will be laughed at in the future the same way we see AOL now. I am completely convinced that they are a fundamentally evil company. The sooner the world realizes that it is nothing more than a creepy spying/advertisement platform the better.
Also, Facebook does provide something of value, though the cost is too great: they are the centralised provider of the One True Social Graph, and by extension your True Identity, which has numerous uses and no decentralised competitor. It's increasingly popular to use Facebook login on third party sites, because it mitigates to some extent the creation of throwaway accounts, which was hitherto considered a largely intractable problem.
We'll have to disagree here. I think Zuckerberg is an evil, amoral person to his core. This hardly needs reposting, but I can't recall Brin or Page ever going on the record calling their users "dumb fucks".[0]
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuc...
Whatever you think of the people, corporations are not people and their behaviour is only partially directed by them. The most reliable predictor of their direction is their bottom line, and the intelligence of the people they hire to improve it.
Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.
It's the constant cat and mouse game. I go in periodically to tighten my security settings and close off more notifications, and they find new vectors to spam me into coming back into their walled garden. Their "frictionless sharing" always feels more like "frictionless privacy betrayal", as it's totally in their interest to disseminate whatever info they can gain as widely as possible. To blur the line between private and public for their benefit.
I don't close my account completely, because I go in once a year to thank people for the birthday greets. They find 21st century AOL more convenient for this than email.
In contrast, I'm one of those oddballs who still uses Google+. Almost exclusively with remote family, to share photos that we've taken during the week to talk about during a hangout. The default sharing "circle" is limited to close family, and that works well.
Feels like a pretty different experience from FB to me.
Plus, I think FB's aggressive cultivation of online relationships erodes old meatspace ones. It's human nature that just casually swiping on your smartphone screen for a status refresh and dopamine hit from your sofa is going to be easier than arranging to meet groups of friends in person. I've certainly found this with some people who live in the same city as me. So I wouldn't say FB is useless - I think it's slightly worse than that.
This is constantly posted out of context.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
He is talking about not using their services because they are subject to US law, which specifically violates privacy by its very nature.
Schmidt also said:
"You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it. Whenever there’s a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy."
There's more nuance to him than that quote.
The dumb part about what Schmidt said is he presumes there is nothing worthwhile about privacy before quickly alluding to a legitimate need for it.
The point about US law is less relevant for me, it's his immediate gut reaction to the legitimacy of privacy.
That's not at all what he's saying. Like... not at all. But alright.
This is why Zuckerberg and Facebook bothers me so much. He is seemingly completely unaware or unwilling to admit the potential for abuse that his technology has created. His messianic complex disallows him from even acknowledging that perhaps there are tradeoffs being made in the name of "connecting the world (that is, making absurd profits)" which are compromising the very stability of our civilization.
I'm sure you never said anything at 20 on IM with a friend that could be used in isolation more than a decade later to show that you're an evil person, right?
20 is old enough to know better than that.
In any case, the real issue isn't that Zuckerberg thought his users were "dumb fucks" when he was young. The issue is that he keeps acting as if he believes it, till today. Take the example of the WhatsApp acquisition. A lot of people, even here on HN, rooted for the WhatApp mantra of "no ads, ever". Now they have clearly been cheated. Interestingly, the usual response to those who complain about this spectacular bait and switch is - "it isn't FB's fault if WhatsApp users were 'too dumb' to trust the words of the company's founder". The lack of ethics amongst these founder types has somehow now become a burden to be borne by the "dumb fucks" who pay for these services with a lack of privacy.
Someone once asked here what is wrong with shadow profiles - that is, why are they actually illegal. The answer was prompt and quite clear - "because those who don't have accounts on FB but have shadow profiles have never explicitly agreed to the ToS". I think if anyone is willing to dig deeper into this issue, it will lead to the same conclusion at a much larger scale - there was nothing "legally wrong" going on, except a large mass of people acting like "dumb fucks" by say, not reading the ToS carefully. Hey, what do you know, supply people with mass quantities of undecipherable garbage called the ToS, and most people are too "dumb" to understand its implications. The assumption of dumbness amongst your users, it turns out, can take you very far - even towards trillion dollar valuations.
Recently, there was this story about the EU fine of 1% of turnover if FB was found guilty of misleading claims. "Those dumb fucks", Zuckerberg probably thought,"the price of providing misleading information is just 1% of the turnover? Who put these dumb fucks in charge?"
I would be very happy to supply more examples if you ask for it.
I'd love an answer to a different question: why do so many tech reporters etc think he's some kind of f'ing genius? Beyond the usual success-worship that is. For instance all of his presidential posturing, I was surprised how little ridicule there was, instead it was "well sure he's a tech genius, but can he really do politics"? I have seen zero evidence of tech brilliance, just ruthless eyeball gathering and ad shilling.
I don't recall FB doing much for lock-in. They basically have only three products, and two of them are just as integrated with things like Twitter as with FB (modulo inline picture expansion of Instagram, which is Twitter's doing)
Google uses your emails to put reminders into your Google Calendar. Uses your Google Calendar to add context to Maps.
The simple reading is just that they had an opportunity to integrate their products. In theory they could offer this integration with other mail providers or calendars.
In practice , do you think MSFT or Yahoo are going to let Google check your emails? Probably not.
Not that Google hasnt done a couple uncompetitive things (Chrome advertising when using FF is a bit much). But the reality is that Google has access to data that can make better usability. And it's kinda hard to do with third party services that are all also building Google-like ecosystems too.
But I have a bunch of third party calendars in Google calendar. I email other people with my Gmail account. I can install Firefox on my Android phone. I can Google search through DDG.
Five years ago I would have agreed but at this point most of the advantages offered by Google's services are non-essential conveniences. Google's competition has caught up faster than they have added new 'must have' features.
For Google calendar, almost any self hosted calendar service can easily compete with that.
Email is also easy to run yourself, as is Google Photos.
"Easy" meaning a task a CompSci student can accomplish during a summer or two of coding.
This obviously diversifies the options quite a bit.
But you can just move it to any other hoster.
Dear lord this isn't even remotely true.
I haven't used any Google services save Maps for nearly 5 years now and I only used Maps a few times when I first learned to drive before realising that OSMand and HERE Maps were actually better.
That's just one example. There are alternatives to pretty much everything Google offers, some even better.
The only thing Google offers that isn't matched is seamless integration between its various services, but if you are not heavily invested in the Google ecosystem to begin with, or are not resistant to change then its not an issue at all to move away from it.
Honestly the most dofficult part of stopping using Google is switching all your email addresses over for the various online services you use. That takes a few hours at most.
On an extended road trip last month I used both Google maps and Apple maps and found them roughly equivalent.
Depends a lot on the region, but in many places, OpenStreetMap is better than Google Maps.
I try to "spread" my data. Apple for maps/messaging/photos, Signal, DuckDuckGo, Gmail, and primarily private tab web surfing. I also use different browsers for different concerns. And of course ad blockers although I'm not sure I've installed them everywhere. With my lack of social media accounts and a reup of my PIA subscription it feels like it should be a fairly private set up.
Of course, if I was really going all the way I'd use cash for everything, and curb the very modest amount of shopping I do on Amazon. I believe creeit cards almost certainly sell information based on your purchase history.
Oh! And don't forget a hat and sunglasses to avoid the myriad of cameras I'd come across in my day to day as a metropolitan.
And of course to turn off wi-fi and bluetooth when in transit. Might even be better to go into airplane mode.
So yea, just get a landline. Use snail mail (although addresses may be scanned). Hang a calendar on the wall (they are pretty, mine is pictures of Italy), stay off social media, use cash, disguise your features, and I dunno, use the internet at the library or something.
In the end, it's a giant pain and it's amazing how many vectors there are for information retrieval on the average citizen of the information age.
> Google says it has access to roughly 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data. By matching ad clicks with this data, Google says it can automatically inform merchants when their digital ads translate into sales at a physical store.
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-a...
Gait analysis can be used to identify individual people.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Biometric_identi...
As a nutritionist myself, with poor blood glucose control if I'm not careful and emotionally affective wheat intolerance, your app, at first glance, looks amazing and very comprehensive. Well done!
If any of ya'll ever find yourself in Tasmania be sure to look me up, email on profile.
And thanks, that's awesome to hear! A lot of parts of the app are definitely a work in progress, and its tough to make appealing looking meal plans that also consistently hit arbitrary nutrition goals. But we're steadily making progress. Never been to Tasmania, but I'll be sure to let you know :)
Installed your app, will have a look. I studied nutrition for a bit so could be interesting.
But now start thinking about some other things:
- Are any of the sites you're using hosted on GCP (or other Google-owned hosting)?
- Even if they're not, do they include any scripts/images/fonts/etc. from other sites that are?
- How much network infrastructure does Google own now? How much of your traffic is passing through it?
Not much but still a heartbeat per GeoIP.
And if you are foolish enough to use 8.8.8.8 for your DNS, they get every site you visit, every network activity requiring a lookup in fact, even where you SSH to.
Don't forget that notes have serial numbers so there is potential for tracking there too even though it would be slower and less precise.
Better use coins (real ones not block chain ones).
I have the location in my Android inactive and everytime I open google maps I get the message:
"To continue, let your device turn on location, which uses Google's location service. cancel - ok"
I have to click cancel every time. I think the language is disingenuous, because if you click cancel you can use the maps anyway. I suppose I should stop using Google Maps.
I use duckduckgo in my android, and the other day I realized that the keyboard where I'm typing is "Gboard - The Google Keyboard".
I suppose it's not calling home with every key, but who knows?, or, if it's not calling, if this will change in the future.
For mobile, totally offline, uses OpenStreetMap data.
MAPS.ME looks really good but I know some areas around here don't have great OpenStreetMap data yet, whereas they do have complete road data on Nokia's app.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...
I wouldn't trust Facebook to not be evil, based on its poor track record on privacy and treating users badly as well as its highly ambitious and callous founder/CEO. I'm also sure that Facebook has been working on dismantling the Google ecosystem or bypassing it wherever possible to control and retain user attention.
Personally I believe Google _IS_ much worse than FB for one simple reason: it's much easier to avoid FB than Google.
With FB the story is simple. You'll miss out on some news/invites from FB-centric friends, but it's pretty easy to go without (or to even find new friends who aren't as hooked on FB as needed).
"Avoiding" Google in your daily life is much, much harder. Their free mail offering is still top-notch. Their search is absolutely incredible. Depending on what you do this list can go on and on. Also, these are things we can't really just "do without" like in FB's case. Alternatives do exist, but often are either paid or not as good.
Personally, I'n going to try and transition away from Google this year just to see how far I can get. Should be an interesting experiment.
For mail I recommend: inventati.org (And if you use them please donate to them!)
For search I recommend: duckduckgo.com (Spend some time using the bang syntax-- such as !w for wikipedia pages --it makes life about 10x easier!
For maps I recommend: openstreetmaps.org
There are more on https://www.privacytools.io/
Please please please stop using Gmail for important communication and account recovery (banking, mission critical services you maintain, etc etc).
Use a paid service from a reputable company who does that one thing only and does it well.
Too many Gmail horror stories.
I pay for a mobile telephone service, but email is more important to me so my convictions necessitate a paid email service from a dedicated provider with a real support team.
I also own my own domain, primarily because now my email address is short and unambiguous to say over the phone.
Fastmail is, for my needs of a few mailboxes (each with its own credentials), very expensive - running into few hundred dollars a year!
Another similar and cheap alternative is Mailbox, which allows custom domains to be used.
Both the services allow IMAP, which was very important for me to have local copies of emails if I ever decide to migrate out.
[1]: https://posteo.de
[2]: https://mailbox.org
share one pls?
Google asked me to either have access to the phone number, and the old password, or to know the security question, have access to the backup email, and know the exact day the account was created on.
Google was not willing to provide any help, not even via the Nexus phone support, and even after a friend who worked at Google submitted an internal recovery form.
After I contacted the new owner of the phone number, and coordinated with him a way for me to authorize via SMS, backup email, old password, security question, and account creation date at the same time, I got back into the account.
In the account I found an email from Google's account recovery support thanking me for contacting them, apparently they had contacted the hijacker after I asked for help, not me.
After changing all data, I went through the login history.
The account was set to German, always used from Germany. Someone tried logging in via several different VPNs, and was blocked a few times, but allowed the last time from Russia.
I had learnt the account was compromised originally because Google sent me an email that an attacker from Russia had logged into the account and changed the password.
So, to recap:
Google realizes that an attacker connects and hijacks an account, emails me, but doesn't prevent it.
Google allows that person to change the password, and tells me that an attacker changed the password, but provides no way to restore it, and doesn't block it.
You can't restore with backup email, security question and old password.
Once Google's internal account recovery team was contacted, they talked with the attacker, not with me, despite being explicitly told I had no control over the account.
A random person was more helpful with restoring the account than Google itself.
Do NOT ever rely on Google, and write down your accountcreation date right now (on desktop, in gmail, settings, pop3 and imap, "pop3 active since" tells you the account creation date)
Due to a close call with one of my own accounts, I absolutely refuse to link a phone number to any online account, for fear of it being required months later when I'm in another country. I still nearly gotten bitten by this problem when Google wanted to use my old android phone itself as a secondary identification method. AFICT, the only safe solution is to also avoid using Android phones (or have no Google accounts you'd care about losing).
Using phone numbers - which are, btw, free with prepaid SIMs - as identifier is dumb in general.
Why did the backup email not worked? Or did they told you about the hijacking via the backup but said the only way to restore is via the number?
a) old password, SMS
b) security question, email , date of account creation.
And I didn't update the phone number because I had stopped using the account, and had forgotten about it (but I also obviously didn't want anyone to spam in my name, or extract my data).
https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-13/how-i-lost-access-m...
I run copperhead on a nexus device (no gapps) use fastmail for email contacts and calendars duckduckgo for search plex and icecast for media matrix for chat mastodon for social media fix standard notes for note taking
YouTube is a challenge, but you can always use youtube-dl and watch via plex asynchronously
the only missing but for me is replacing photos. Plex does and ok job, but it isn't quite as seamless as I would like.
Check the Video Assistant extension to play embedded videos in external player:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/video-assistant/
Because you don't get the option to take your data back, ever. So you can't only consider the present state.
You also don't really "choose" to give your data through Google Analytics. You can block it, but that's a lot different than choosing to give it in the first place. Even if you do block it, that's still only client-side and it's possible that the site is sending data through other methods that you can't control.
And like I mentioned in another comment already, what about sites that are hosted on GCP, sites that make requests to other sites that are hosted on GCP, Google network infrastructure, etc.?
You get a choice about some of it, but certainly nowhere near all of it.
Both are exceedingly bad. Both have proven exceedingly harmful (and, yes, useful, which is actually a reason why they're so perniciously harmful).
I never fell into Facebook's maw, though that's cost some inconvenience.
I've somewhat extracted myself from Google's, though still only partially:
DuckDuckGo for search. It's quite good, and I prefer bang search and actual, direct links rather than Google redirects. Though I still miss ranged date search.
OpenStreetMap for maps.
ProtonMail for email. It's not everything it could be, the client has some annoying limitations, and neither IMAPS nor POPS are supported. But at least it's not Gmail. There are other options as well.
My router blocks Google analytics, and a large set of other adtech hosts.
Despite being known as a critic of it, I use G+ heavily. With appropriate pruning and blocking, it's useful.
But how principled the founders are is only one part of the picture, and Google just has the potential to be a lot scarier. People change, companies outlive tight control by individual people, and explicitly-evil actors with armies force companies to do things or compromise their systems (this already happened to some degree a few years ago).
I don't really understand why HN goes on and on about how social media is inevitable and you're just a victim of its use. It's pretty easy to drop Facebook and pay a pretty trivial cost. Avoiding Google products, on the other hand, requires a sustained attempt in a dozen different product areas to use usually-inferior products. It's not impossible, but you pay a fairly hefty cost, to the point that most people don't bother. As you mention, they also have a lot finer grained data about what you actually do, as opposed to Facebook mostly knowing what you care to share.
The actually bad thing would be something like - you watch alt-right YouTube videos, and Google doesn't hire you because of that if you apply for a job. But even that isn't remotely close to the totalitarian government level of oppression, where you get executed for disagreeing with the party line.
Chances are, you are not important, and nobody cares where you go to eat and whoats with you.
The Nazis used highly in-depth Dutch census data during WW2 to hunt down and murder Jews and undsesirables in the country.
That data was considered harmless, even useful by the population to that point. Things changed, and that data became very useful to evil people.
This is why people in Germany and many eastern European countries are not sold on government surveillance for their own good, they lived under pervasive Soviet surveillance.
That kind of power can and likely will end up in the wrong hands eventually, so it is always best to keep it in check or just not have it at all.
The actually bad thing is everybody acts like a) they are, and b) they can't and won't ever change.
Chances are, you are not important, and nobody is looking out to make sure they don't crush you.
In this scenario, you are the bug on the interstate which hits a car windshield. "Oh but the humans aren't out to get you, look at this big open space they made for us, what's so bad if the car knows where you are?".
As an example, just take a fairly normal life situation like going out for dinner with some friends, and think about how much of it goes "through" Google:
---
One of your friends sends an email to 6 others, to ask if everyone's free for dinner on Friday. 5 of the 7 people involved use gmail or a google apps address.
You've never heard of the restaurant they're suggesting, so you search for it on Google to see what kind of food it is.
You click to the restaurant's site. It uses Google Analytics, so even though you're no longer on Google, it still knows the exact path you take through the site while you're "outside".
You decide the restaurant looks good, and enter the dinner into Google Calendar.
On Friday, you use Google Maps to get to the restaurant, so Google knows exactly where you were before, what time you left, and the route you took. While you're driving, maybe you send a couple of text messages using the Google voice assistant.
At the restaurant, it turns out your friend Doug is there, even though he wasn't part of the emails. During dinner, you're all trying to remember the name of that movie where Shaq plays a genie, so both you and Doug grab your phones and google for phrases like "shaq movie genie" at about the same time. Even though Doug wasn't included in any of the planning, Google now knows that you're almost certainly together, and what you're talking about.
You finish your meal and pay via the restaurant's Square system, which emails the receipt to your gmail address. Google now knows exactly what you ate, and how much you paid for it.
You use Google Maps again when leaving, telling Google exactly how long you stayed at the restaurant and where you're going next.
---
I didn't even push that very far. There are multiple other things I could have easily added, and you can do this with almost any situation. It's quite insane how much Google knows about what people are doing all the time, and the level of detail they can get by combining these things.