Scarily Good

My new phone (I upgraded to a Galaxy Note 2 as I was running up against memory limitations on the Note 1) has a potentially useful but also quite scary feature. There’s a service running on it called “Google Now”. This has no direct user interface, but just pops occasional reminders into the notification bar.

This afternoon I had an appointment, which I had recorded in Outlook simply as “Sally” with the location “Strada Cobham”. At about 2.40 a reminder popped up which said not just “you have an appointment at 3”, but “leave by 2.54 to be on time” , quite an accurate estimate of the required driving and parking time!

I’m impressed, but also slightly concerned. What other information is Google mining from tiny bits of data of mine?