Thursday 27 November 2014

Apple knows you know

I have a work provided iPhone as well as my own personal phone.

I actually don’t really use my work phone - I have a work phone principally because I used to travel a lot overseas and in Australia and by giving me a phone it meant I could do the ET phone home thing when there was a problem without having to try and reclaim the cost of calls.

And smartphones allow you to do more - I’ve never quite been at the stage of a colleague who ssh’d into a recalcitrant box from his iPhone while transiting in Seoul - but you get the picture.

Now the iPhone ‘knows’ some things if you scroll down on the lock screen it will tell you the temperature and what events you have scheduled - and in the afternoons how long it would take you to drive home - strangely enough always 29 minutes.

Now I usually go to the supermarket to do the weekly shop on Wednesdays because we like to to the Farmer’s market and deli shopping together on Saturday mornings. So every Wednesday I’m off to Mawson to buy the staples plus some fresh salad, bread, OJ etc.

Yesterday for some reason I checked the outside temperature before leaving work on my iPhone rather than my personal phone. And I noticed that it said it would take you 23 minutes to drive to Mawson right now - ie my phone ‘knew’ it was Wednesday and that I go to a supermarket in Mawson that day.

Computationally quite interesting and slightly scary …

Written with StackEdit.

No comments: