Plot Twist:
When google's algorithms decided those two individuals should pair, it started showing them ads for the same events in order to increase the probability of them meeting.<p>The goal was achieved by the system in 3 months, exactly as predicted with a 99% probability with a 95% CI.<p>The system's next goal is to subtly nudge the couple to reproduce within the next year in order to help google meet their user accounts targets for 2034.
> It makes me feel very philosophical. Likely we had walked past each other every other week for three years with our heads down, or in the clouds, paying very little notice to the people around us. Past Channon had not the foggiest clue what impact an unnoticed stranger would come to have on her. Since learning this I can’t help but look at the passers-by in my day-to-day life in a different light.<p>And no shame in getting philosophical. It may not have been time. Perhaps you were not the same person, or nor was he. In meeting at the right time, <i>stars are aligned</i>, it was the right time to intersect. Or perhaps a host of other reasons. There may have been better times, perhaps bounded for this success quite close to or at the time you didn 'meet'. And who knows what other 'success' could have worked out - collaborators in something, getting together when 're meeting' - we don't know, an individual's life's not repeatable, and that in itself is beautiful.<p>It is indeed fascinating mapping and wondering, and probably applicable to a lot. But not to downplay the philosophical side, as that's important, and important the OP included it.
I was reluctant to mention this kind of story in such a sweet context but a few comments have already touched on privacy, so I want to add my two cents.<p>At some point in the past I had the surreal experience of opening a news website and seeing a familiar face on the front page. Not a celebrity, rather a man whose face had been in some small subfolder of my brain for several years.<p>The man had been convicted of serial rape. He would drug victims and record them. He was known to be active within a certain time range from the timestamps of the videos. He repeated this dozens of times and was only caught after the final victim woke up during the act. Authorities appealed for people to come forward with any more information because they believed there could be more victims than were discovered from the videos.<p>By cross-referencing the location data from my phone with the date of an event my Last FM profile and the location of his home, I was able to confirm why he looked familiar. This allowed me to contact the authorities and bring the start of the known time frame significantly forward.<p>(there might be enough information in this post for the perpetrator to be identified - if you do, please keep it to yourself)
Many years ago, when everybody had Nokias with the Bluetooth on, I used to do a similar thing.<p>I created a S60 python script that kept scanning Bluetooth mac addresses and link them with the cell tower I was connected to (no GPS yet on mobiles).Then later processed the logs to see if I encountered the same people in different locations and times.<p>And yes, I re-encountered a bunch of Bluetooth mac addresses in different locations. For me it was fascinating at that time :)
When my wife and I combined our photo libraries later in life, we found a photo of the two of us, back-to-back at a ball a few years before we first met.
This is a great use of one's location data.<p>I've personally found Google's location history to be a net positive for me.
From places I've been whose precise addresses I can't remember (e.g. distant family events), to tracking hospital, doctor visits.<p>I've even used it as a proxy for timesheets when I used to work from an office on weeks where I wouldn't have recorded my activities well (like which client I visited, how long I took lunch, etc).
> <i>I'm glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats.</i><p>41.25 near-misses, until The Answer was the crossing that wasn't a miss: 42
My takeaway is this: If you want to meet your significant other, attend a university. After university your chances will dwindle down as you won't frequent that big come together place any more.
I’ve wanted detailed tracking for years. Something that logged my position every five seconds or something. I wanted this to be something that other people did too.<p>Then we can decide to share histories and see when we ever overlapped or were near each other. For instance - I became close friends with someone this summer but it turns out we were both at the same events across the USA about 8 years ago. It made me wonder where else we had both been and hadn’t really spoken to each other.<p>I’ve also wanted this to be a live feature as well where you can opt in to share your location and be like, “hey, Jim is just a block away. What a coincidence! Jim is usually 1500 miles from you.” As a way to run into friends you haven’t seen in a while.<p>Another instance is that I had lost touch with a friend from years back. We had both lived in Seattle for years. I eventually moved to SF and was at an event. I stepped outside a few times to get air and on one of the times I did - I saw this old friend walk by on the street (it’s almost midnight - he was going to go home to sleep with someone). I call out his name and he’s in shock and awe. We decide to hang out for 30 minutes and decided that this was the sign we needed to reconnect.<p>That happened about 5 years ago and we’ve been very close ever since.<p>Sometimes I feel like these kinds of things would be cool to have. Or to do a prospectus and see a year ago - “oh interesting - that guy I gave a ride to five years ago was at the same restaurant as me… Huh - I wonder why we didn’t see each other?” The world is much smaller than we realize. I’ve run into people in small rural parking lots of grocery stores in random countries 8,000 miles away from where we both had known each other without any coordination. If I had been even 10s later in my actions - I would’ve never seen them sometimes.<p>I have a lot of stories like this. Timing is everything!!
If you are interested in tinkering with personal data exports using SQL, my friend and I made Bionic: <a href="https://github.com/bionic/bionic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bionic/bionic</a>.<p>The README includes an example of calculating songs you often listen to while walking/driving/using public transit (by combining Google Maps and Spotify data).
My now wife picked me up in a bar in 1992.<p>After we met, it was clear that we had been frequenting the same bars for about three years, and had attended many shows together/apart, but neither of us had any recollection of recognizing each other at any prior point. The shows were significant acts (for example, an ear bleedingly loud Bob Mould at the Green Parrot in Neptune NJ) that had to be the same show, could not possibly have been a different weekend with some common local band.<p>But there you have it. No contact until she noticed me sitting at the bar watching a live band at a worn out dive bar/night club, and wanted to know what my T-shirt said. She was drunk. She was adorable. I was smitten.
Wow, this is really neet! Whenever I see R (and the tidyverse in general) I always can't believe how clean and easy it to to do aebitary data visualisation like this.
This sounds sort of similar to Strava Flybys[0]. It users your run/ride location data and show people who posted public activies that passed you by. Sometimes interesting, but I bet a lot of Strava users who post their activities as "public" don't know this feature exists and might turn to "followers only" if they did.<p>[0] <a href="https://labs.strava.com/flyby/" rel="nofollow">https://labs.strava.com/flyby/</a>
"There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning."<p><a href="https://poets.org/poem/love-first-sight" rel="nofollow">https://poets.org/poem/love-first-sight</a>
Can people now just meet each other without an App? Is it generally possible to just kick off conversations with people you haven't been introduced to? I mean if these two were sitting under the same apple tree, they'd be on their phones checking out Bumble, surely?
There’s a play about this, the name escapes me, but it’s a “quantum” love story: two people meet and at each step options present; the catch is the possibility tree doesn’t converge (one character had a midlife disease, which only happened in some of the branches).<p>It was absolutely fantastic. Just tremendous. Think it played in New York, Dallas and New York at a minimum.
This is interesting, if only for the fact that track data did not show a correlation between these two people. 40-ish near misses over a few years would never have made me think that these two tracks were related in any way… then an external force brought them together. I’d like to see how their tracks look now; that is to say
A) here’s the tracks of people livi my similar lives w/o a relationship
B) here’s the tracks of two people who share a relationship
(And eventually, not wishing for anything) C) here’s the tracks of two people who no longer share a relationship, but once did<p>Building the relationships between two objects is, by far, the most difficult part of the tracking problem. And, this source code definitely does and interesting job to measuring… something. That “something” seems like a worthy metric to look into.
This is an analysis should probably be read while listening to Dave Matthews Band Ants Marching. Really cool analysis and fun to see it written in R.<p>Jerr Thorpe had an app that gave you your power back and tracked your phone info in a way you could have yourself for awhile but it became abandonware and started eating battery life so I took it off my phone. OpenPaths, that was it's name. <a href="https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths" rel="nofollow">https://www.jerthorp.com/openpaths</a>
My spouse and I passed each other all the time because we lived in the same neighborhood. I almost had the courage to approach her. Ironically, we ended up meeting through a dating website!
The source is here, if anyone is wondering: <a href="https://github.com/channon036/how_fateful" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/channon036/how_fateful</a><p>It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
> I’m glad to have gone down this rabbit hole because now I think about the 41.25 near-misses we had, where if an audience had been watching they may have been on the edge of their seats. On the 16th of August 2017, exactly one week short of three years before we would meet, we’re recorded at the same GPS coordinates in this spot where I frequently had lunch, near a coffee booth in the social sciences building. Did he just trot past on the stairs? Did he take a seat in the shade under the trees? Did we queue together in line for coffee? I guess Google doesn’t have the answer for everything. but it’s pleasant to imagine when we have our coffee together every morning that years before we may have silently enjoyed coffee near each other.<p>This is very sweet. I hope by the time I get married I'm this good at coding, so I too could see all the times my husband almost met me! By then there might be cameras with years of accessible history scattered around the city.
This is beautiful! I've often had the same thought when meeting new people—"What's the closest we've been before now?", "Have we looked at each other as strangers before?", etc.<p>A similar one I'd love to know is what's the furthest apart I've seen the same bird?
And this friends is why "third party" entities collecting your meta data and such is a concern. A lot (read: enough) can be learned about you *and who you associate* without actually listening to your calls, etc.<p>On the surface, this article is cute. After that it's a red flag for all of us.
Interesting how sometimes it does not matter. You meet in spacetime. I would not have relationships with my wife, who is subjectively perfect, have we met earlier in our lives. We have discussed this on multiple occasions and the conclusion was definite.
This story reminds me of the Tim Minchin song, if I didn't have you: <a href="https://youtu.be/Zn6gV2sdl38" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Zn6gV2sdl38</a>
Storytime!<p>Years ago I boarded an almost empty plane from my country to a country where I had just started to live. The crew let a printed list of the passengers on one of the seats, I took the list and stored it somewhere. Flash forward few years later: I had met a lot of people in that country, inclusive from my own country. And one day, I rediscovered that boarding list I had totally forgotten about, just to find out that I had ended up knowing one of the persons on it.
This is delightful. I also live in Cape Town and met my girlfriend on Bumble right after the lockdowns (and curfews) ended. I’m tempted to do this as well
This is a great article. Just to save everyone's time, here is a directly link to Google Takeout where you can download the data mentioned in the article: <a href="https://takeout.google.com/takeout/custom/local_actions,location_history,maps,mymaps?dnm=false" rel="nofollow">https://takeout.google.com/takeout/custom/local_actions,loca...</a>
this is fascinating. i'd be interested in an anonymous dating app where i feed in my location and it matches me up with others... highly likely that if we like the same places then we might like each other (or at least, dating might be a bit easier)
That is great, a big chunk of my Ph.D thesis was about evaluation people's mobility and identifying the routine behavior in our mobility. It is crazy!
i guess the next question is of those 33 recorded instances (or 41.25 possible instances), how many people were around the two of them? if they were literally standing within arms reach of each other, but also within arms reach of a dozen other people, it may not be that interesting if they never connected. but if they were within 5 meters of each other, and there weren't anyone else within a 100 meters of the two of them, that would have been a pretty awful missed connection.
I loved the personal story of two people trying to figure out past history based on data. But the fact that his comes from centralized datamines maintained by bigtech is unsettling.
Could this be an idea for an app? You can search your contacts and it will show location, date and time of when you were less than 20 feet from each other.
What a gentlemen!<p>How I used my new boyfriends tracking location to realize he spends almost all of his free time in one of our local gentlemen clubs!
>> Likely we had walked past each other every other week for three years with our heads down, or in the clouds, paying very little notice to the people around us.<p>Or looking at your phone...
how i met your mother, hands down the best tv show ever,,,,,,, did this before location tracking was a thing...... "the best burger in NY", a classic
These are amazing ETL skills, but a big red flag, I thought I was watching the revival of the infamous Overly Attached Girlfriend. As someone said there, this is great and scary at the same time.<p>Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled:<p>A) they are Google employees
B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them