Google Maps Will Know All About You

If you look at Google Maps, know that Google Maps will also look at you, too.

Two Google Maps designers told an audience at San Francisco's Roadmap 2013 conference on Tuesday that eventually "every map will be customized for a specific person and location," according to GigaOm. Basically, the more Google Maps knows about you, the better the map.

For those of you groaning at yet another assault on your privacy, it's the price you pay for wanting all that information at your fingertips. Jonah Jones, a user experience designer at Google, said that customizing maps is the future of map technology, including creating new maps for every possibility.

For instance, Google Maps would usually map features or businesses, but now armed with user information and prior experience, it can map locations that the user may have previously visited or found on Google's search engine. Product manager Bernhard Seefeld told the audience that Google Maps can actually think for users, including showing flight times when users are at airports. Your actual location becomes a query, according to Seefeld.

But is one's location really a query? Not usually, because mostly it's simply a location. Anticipating user needs seems to be jargon for selling users more ads and taking in more of their information to sell to third parties. Perhaps we're wrong, but relying on a machine to do your thinking for you probably isn't the best way to go through life.

 
 
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