I think we are going to start seeing a lot more privacy minded services, browsers, websites, hardwares, etc popping up this year. Unfortunately, I also believe we will become more and more reliant on the non-privacy minded services we use and become less fearful of them / more willing to sacrifice our privacy for the benefits they offer.
I don't know how many of you consistently use Google Now and how many of those have used Google Now while traveling internationally. Let me tell you, it is epic.
(1) It automatically pulls my flight details from my email and sticks them in a card. That card is automatically updated with terminal / gate when the flight has a gate. Fuck off boards of uber-contrasty lists of all the upcoming flights in an airport. No more searching through emails. It is just there.
(2) It also tells me how long it will take me to get from my current location to that airport in the form of "leave by 6:42pm (15 minute delay due to heavy traffic) to arrive at AIRPORT by 7:15 to make your 9:15 flight.)
(3) It automatically gives me a "time at home" card. I only woke my mother up at 3:30am once with menial text messages once on this whole trip!
(4) It automatically gives me a currency converter from USD to that currency and has it automatically filled in with a number that makes the math more simple.
(5) It has a quick translate from english - current locations language and auto fills in "good morning" "good afternoon" and "good evening". Unfortunately, not as helpful in places like Thailand and Sri Lanka where they do not use Latin characters. Ah well.
(6) Any places I've recently looked up on maps it throws in there for fun with the distance time and/or wikipedia information about that location. Fun fact! I now google map every sight I go to because surprise! it's easier to confirm that that's the actual sight, it auto corrects and auto fills spelling better than google search, AND it has short summary & read more on wikipedia link in the description. Are you fucking kidding me? This is amazing! Take my data if you are going to save me from keeping all my travel documents safe and give me single swipe for everything I need to know instead of 5 separate apps.
Anyways..that got long winded. Point being. At least we'll still have uber privacy for certain situations. But the rest of the time we're going to have uber trackage and uber selling of our data.
Also - last 2015 prediction - Uber will fail miserably and valuation will ground-plummet. Think groupon. See you in 2016 ladies & gents!
exactly. this is more "hey we found out this exists before most of you so we're telling you now.". To the people who already knew it's " god dammit now we have to move again soon. "
Probably a little dodgy, too. I mean, even considering what it is.