Another great entry to the gallery of over-hyped, poorly thought-out clickbait.<p>What this is, as far as I can understand, is a creepy, invasive ‘service’ that for the benefit of alleviating the users of the need to select whatever text they are interested in finding out more about and pasting it into a search-box will cost them an eternal window into their behaviour in the context of whichever app they are using.<p>Also, it seems to me that this is the ultimate defeat for Google, not a stunning advance: retreating to the God Of The Gaps.<p>I might be wrong (I usually am), but “oh wow” was not the first thing I thought when I heard of this, it was more along the lines of “oh yuck”. For how much longer will Android/Google users realise that <i>they</i> are the product and that all these actions are simply aimed at mining them more deeply?
In addition to giving Google even more access to data, I wonder what the antitrust implications could be.<p>Will 3rd parties also be able to user the same hooks that given them access to every other app's text? Wouldn't that turn into a nasty free-for-all where every app tries to steal as much data as possible, now that they can bypass the few restrictions Android imposes?<p>If access is limited to Google - that is, that this is some "OS feature" instead an app that uses features available to any developer, isn't this effectively the same issue as <i>United States v. Microsoft Corp.</i>?