Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network

Kisai · August 12, 2020

10 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Waiting for Car Crash Detection to be mainstream

This has been a standard feature on Ford cars to call 911 if you turn it on and have a bluetooth phone capable of making calls paired. (I have my mom's crappy prepaid android phone paired to her car.)

There's really only 4 things I want "big data" to track and I won't care about:

a) Weather

b) Natural disasters where a shelter-in-place/stay-indoors alert would be critical (actual emergencies, not amber alert, or decrees by politicians)

c) Traffic/GPS*/Anti-theft

d) Pulserate/Crash/Falling

eg, The weather is fine and innocuous, you could gleam where I live by it, but it's not pertinent to knowing my habits other than maybe staying indoors when it rains. If there is an Earthquake or Tsunami, you betcha I want to know if I'm nearby and where to take shelter.

For Traffic/GPS/Transit, I only want this turned on, while in motion, and while in motion I want the device to not distract. If the phone is paired to a car, the car should tell the phone when it's moving and lock the screen. If you're on transit and using the transit WiFi, the device should know it's on the train and not a car, but it can also infer it's on non-train transit by the actual altitude. For anti-theft, any time the device is outside my WiFi "home" report "home" every time the phone moves, but not to big data.

That just leaves "oh did I drop my phone or did I fall down the stairs?" to which a fitness tracker would be required to track the elevated heart rate, or maybe sudden flatline, in which case the bare minimum the phone should do is send a "are you okay? do you need help?" via the voice assistant. This kind of thing can quite literately save people on bikes or those who have fallen down embankments while on bikes/scooters or even if the just slip on snow/ice. If there is no fitness tracker/smartwatch, then the phone has to assume it's just being mishandled. If you're in a car, or have fallen and can't get up, have the voice assistant call 911 and let it tell the dispatcher where you are.

Now, things like Amber Alerts are a different animal and need to be as specific as possible, otherwise you'll needlessly trigger people's anxiety every time an emergency alert goes out and it's not relevant for your immediate area +/- 100 miles.

j.son19 · August 12, 2020

On 8/11/2020 at 7:10 PM, GOTSpectrum said:

due to this my google assistant has lost almost all of it's functionality. I can't even ask the assistant to call someone from my contacts for example. Now I don't know why Google needs to track my web activity to be able to call my mum when I ask but here we are.

With the web and app activity you can set it to auto delete and you can also download all of the data that is on your google account so you can see what is on there. For me the location tracking does seem a bit odd as I have had my google account for about 4 years and it says I have only been to 89 places in maps which just seems a bit low considering how I am a very busy person and I always have my location on.