At yesterday's Google I/O keynote speech, Google laid out its vision for Android Auto (reported here yesterday), which is quite similar to Apple's CarPlay. I've ranted here before about Apple's CarPlay when it was first announced and after more details came out last March. Both have the idea that your phone can hijack the screen in your car. What's newsworthy from Google is that we have an enlarged list of vendors who are playing along. (Wired has the full list. Suffice to say that you'll have plenty of choices if you want a car that goes both ways, if you know what I mean. Most interesting factoid: Tesla isn't playing with either Apple or Google. Hear that? It's the sounds of thousands of alpha-nerd Tesla owners crying out in terror.)
Today, I want to address why you should stop worrying and learn to love having your phone in charge of your car's telematics display.
Using most computer crap in cars will kill you. I've had enough of people arguing about BMW i-Drive vs. Audi MMI vs. giant Tesla touchscreens vs. your smartphone. You all don't get it. They're all part of a Communist plot to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Or at least distract us and get us into horrific driving accidents. When you're driving, you should have your hands on the wheel, or your passenger's thigh. No, no, definitely on the wheel.
But some computer crap in cars is exceptionally valuable. When you're driving somewhere new, nav systems are great. Even if you're driving somewhere you go all the time, modern nav systems like Waze give you real-time user-reported intel on the traffic and even where the speed traps are. But how do Waze drivers report speed traps? They press tiny buttons on the phone and promptly create new accidents for other Waze drivers to report.
So how can you use a computer in your car safely? What we've seen so far from the automakers is largely a massive failure on this front. BMW's iDrive, no matter how much they simplify it, is still an abomination upon humanity. Tesla's giant and beautiful touchscreen, much like the Chevy Volt and other new cars that don't have real buttons any more, require you to look for the button you're trying to press. Prior attempts at voice recognition are laughably inaccurate, particularly once the car is moving at freeway speed and you've got wind noise and tire noise, never mind a blaring stereo. What's left? The thing that Google seems to get, and you know Apple will copy it a year later and claim they invented first, is that they have all this knowledge about you. Your calendar has your destination address right next to your appointment. And they know where you live and where you drive every day on your commute. Why is this a good thing? Because Google will (hopefully) be very good at guessing what you're up to and will just do it with little or no user intervention at all. When you do need to use your voice to tell your nav system what to do, or what music you want to play, you'll get the benefit of Google's backend data center megabrain which can do a way better job of figuring out what you're talking about than the puny computer in your car or phone. Why? Because it's got context. If you're trying to navigate to a some business, it's going to compare your vocal garble to the names of local destinations, especially if you did a Google search on your computer beforehand or your buddy emailed you the address. If you're trying to play some hipster indie band, it's going to look at the names in your library and in its "people who like X tend to like Y" megabrain graph. Smaller search space = higher recognition accuracy.
But I don't trust the Google megabrain with my precious privacy fluids. We are rapidly approaching a moment of truth, both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing, but the fact is that you're already telling Google, Apple, the NSA, OkCupid, and the fiendish fluoridators far too much about yourself. It's a huge pain to keep apps from profiling you, but you can do it if you insist. (I use the totally not user-friendly XPrivacy. My proposed solution for the real world: government regulation. But I digress.) For the rest of us, there's a tradeoff. You give up some privacy. In return you get something. Maybe that something is a free version of some game. You could pay $1 and get the advertising-free version. But do you pay that dollar? No? That's how little you truly value your own privacy.
When you use Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, or Microsoft Win9 Cartopia Enterprise Edition, you're indeed giving up some privacy, but look at what you're getting back. You're getting good stuff. For a great price.
How will we ultimately trade our privacy for all these great features? Will Google crack down on apps' ability to learn totally unnecessarily personal things about you? (There is a new feature in Android "L" that's supposed to help with this.) Will government regulators ultimately crack down on Google? We'll see. Now let's get this thing on the hump — we got some flyin' to do.
from The Truth About Cars http://ift.tt/Jh8LjA
Put the internet to work for you.
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