Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of clicking agree on pop-ups on the internet without ever reading a word of them. I'm your friend, David Pierce, and I got a new phone. Um, I know I told you I was done with this wild phone experiment that I've been on, and that's true, but that doesn't mean that I don't get needlessly excited about some wacky new idea about how phones are supposed to work, especially if they're supposed to save me from using my phone too much.
The new one I have is called the Side Phone. And the idea is basically it's like a minimalist Android phone, but it has attachments for the bottom half. So essentially, imagine a BlackBerry, but you can lift off the keyboard and it just has sort of individually replacement parts. So you can have one that looks like an actual kind of full keyboard, but then you can also put on just number keys if all you want to use it for is to make calls. But the one I think is most fun is it has an iPod-style click wheel that you can just stick into place and suddenly you have a thing that looks like an iPod.
I find this so charming and I love the idea of a phone that can be lots of things but tries very hard to only be one of them at a time. And you have to be like, I am using my phone as a camera now, so I'm going to attach the thing and use it as a camera, and it's less useful as everything else. And then you're like, well, I'm going to use it as a music player now, and it's not everything to everyone at all times, even though it can do lots of things. I think it's very cool. I need to test this phone a bunch more. I have a bunch of questions about how this hardware is going to hold up over time, frankly, but also whether this idea of interchangeable keyboards can make a phone feel minimalist and useful all at the same time. But I'm pretty excited about it.
But today's show is not about smartphones mostly. Today's show is about two things. First, Kate Klonick, a professor and author, is going to come on the show and talk about cookies. Specifically, those cookie banners that appear at the bottom of just about every web page you go on, which she thinks need to go away. And right now, then Allison Johnson from The Verge is going to come on and tell us about her experience with a feature called Ask Maps, which lets Gemini and Google Maps use AI to plan your life for you out in the real world. I think it's really interesting and exciting. Allison's had some fun experiments. I'm excited to talk about it.
We also have a really fun question on the Vergecast hotline. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline.
[email protected] is the email about smartphones. We're going to talk a little bit about smartphones. It's going to be great. All that is coming up in just a sec. But first, um, I need to take this thing on a music player spin because if you give me a thing that looks like a click wheel, I need to play with a click wheel. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
All right, we're back. Let's talk cookies. So, cookie banners are one of those sort of low-grade annoyances of being online that I think everybody has just learned to deal with, right? You go to a website, it pops up, you can click agree, or you can click more info, or you can click, I don't know, don't track or whatever. Sometimes if you don't accept the cookies, it just kicks you out of whatever you were trying to do. So, everybody just clicks agree. You accept the cookies, you get the cookies, you move on with your life. This is not great product, but it's also fine, right?
I think if you polled most people about what sucks about being online, I'm not sure cookie banners would be the number one thing on the list. Which is why I thought it was so surprising that Kate Klonick, who is a professor at St. John's and a writer and an author and someone who has been tracking legal and political technology for a very long time, wrote a very strong and powerfully worded piece recently about why we need to kill cookie banners. Not rethink them, not make them smaller, not make them more useful, get rid of them entirely.
I asked Kate to come on the show both to explain how she arrived at this thesis and also how cookie banners arrived at this place. It seems like a reasonable idea, right? Tell people about the data that's being collected and how it's being used, but we've gotten away from that. The thing is not doing what it is supposed to, and I wanted to know why. So, I asked Kate to come on and explain the whole history of cookie banners. That is what she did. We had a lot of fun. I think you're going to enjoy it, too. Let's get into it. Kate Klonick, welcome to the Vergecast.
I brought you here to talk about cookies, the scourge of the internet. And I'm curious why for you this became an issue worth doing sort of real research and writing on, why it rose past the level of like annoying thing I click on on the internet to let me study why this thing is such a problem.
So, I was living in Europe. I was on a Fulbright in Paris to research the Digital Services Act. And I was there and I thought the cookie banners were bad when I lived in the United States and they were just even worse when I was in Europe. And it was especially difficult because I was a stranger in a strange land. I was constantly on my phone trying to call things up like locations of things, translations of things, and they just were just this like oppressive level of clicking through and this block to me getting to this very simple thing that I wanted, like a currency conversion or like a translation of a phrase or the location of a restaurant or anything.
And it just became, I just was like, you know, or I'd look up like a sweater and it was like you'd say yes to the cookie banners when you entered the site and then you'd click on the sweater and you'd say yes to the cookie banners again when you got taken through to the next page. And it just was like ridiculous. And this just seemed to me to be this really acute piece, like this tangible piece of tech policy everyone could relate to.
And as I was kind of writing this screed, the European Commission decided to re-evaluate the law, the underlying regulations that had kind of been part of the genesis of why we have cookie banners. And so I kind of was like, 'Oh, maybe someone will actually read this and listen to it and it won't just be like me shouting at the old man shouting at the sky.'
Yeah. I actually do want to talk about the how we got to this in Europe piece of it because my experience of cookie banners really starts with GDPR. I had not realized the extent to which this is like a two-decade-old idea in Europe. So can you just kind of quickly walk through the history of the cookie banner maybe before it hit people like me in the US?
Yeah. So depending on kind of when you count the beginning of the cookie banner, it's either 15 or kind of 25 years old. And to explain that you kind of have to look at like the origins of the EU's ePrivacy Directive and there was a lot of agitation when there was a certain merger that now it's kind of, you know, past, but there was all of a sudden people realized that the money of the internet was going to be ads and so there were a bunch of mergers in like the early 2000s with DoubleClick and like Google and like a bunch of acquisitions and so those actually kind of lit the world on fire for the first time.
And one of the things that people were concerned about was all of this was running on kind of this interesting artifact of the internet, which is a cookie. And as I say in the article, the cookie is a neutral technology. It's actually pretty necessary for how the internet works. It creates kind of a, like it means that you're not in like this stateless space and that you're kind of moving forward or backwards from different pages and how you do a search. I kind of compare it to breadcrumbs is kind of like the best way to put it. It kind of like leaves this trail that you can follow either way and makes it much more usable, makes it usable at all for the user.
So there's like this necessary part of cookies, but the second that you could realize that you could kind of track what a user was doing online, that is incredibly immensely powerful and valuable to ad tracking technology. And then we developed all of these ways that they were tracking us across the internet and people were worried. I think like with good reason. People at the time did not understand fully kind of what this was revealing about their personal identifiable information. They didn't realize what if it was revealing anything at all. They didn't want to be commoditized.
And this is something that Europe, we tried to pass stuff in the US. It didn't, spoiler alert, it did not happen, and the EU decided to take it up. And the EU has a very different fundamental framework for how they regulate around privacy than the US, which made it more plausible that they could pass something like this and that it could take effect in all of Europe. And so that's what they did in the ePrivacy Directive. And so the interesting thing was that there's nothing in that piece of regulation that says anything about a banner, anything about a pop-up, anything about notice.
It says that you have to have the right to refuse such processing. And so this slowly kind of gets, and this is kind of a story a little bit about regulatory capture and how industry, how like when you regulate something and you don't know what it means, what ends up happening is like industry and lobbyists and like lawyers end up like basically deciding what it means and all kind of coming around some type of level of compliance that they are assured will make it so they don't get fined, right? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, and then that becomes the interpretation of the law.
So there's like this kind of black and white concept people have of a lot of law that like it is what it is. But this is like a perfect example of like it says that the directive was about the purpose of the processing and the user has to be offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. And I won't bore everyone with all of the kind of back and forth, but essentially over time, even though there are some letters and some opinions that are advisory that say that this isn't about a pop-up banner, that ends up being what proliferates through industry.
So that's why I also want to say there's two things. There's a misunderstanding that it was just the GDPR that kind of put cookie banners on steroids. It put it a little bit on steroids, but like they were pretty prolific before that. And then the second thing is that it is all Europe's fault, which it is not. Like I really like, you know, it's not that it's not their fault, that there's plenty of blame to go around for this. And so like very specifically this regulation did not necessarily have to turn out this way.
And it is a part I think that industry deserves as much blame in this being their solution to it as, you know, potentially if you want to put blame on people, which I don't really think is worth doing, the European laws are fair. That's a secondary level of the solution to this, which is people like, I get that you hate these, but like why not just leave them in place? Like they're not doing any harm. And that's actually what I argue in this paper is that they actually are doing harm. We would be better off without them than this world with them.
And so like that, like it's not even they were just like completely neutral and they did nothing, then fine, but that they're not. And so that's actually kind of the big takeaway.
Yeah. I want to interrogate the 'we'd be better off without them' argument a little bit because I think, and correct me if I'm mischaracterizing this, but I think one of the things you say is that we've spent so long with cookie banners as an answer. Everybody identified this as a way to satisfy the letter of the law sort of literally and figuratively and get away with it, and we have done our privacy work, everything is fine, no one's going to sue us, we're not going to get fined by the EU, and it has sort of calcified into this crappy experience that accomplishes nothing but it works.
And that the thing we should do is tear it down in such a way that what we actually do is have new conversations about new ways to do this right. We need different kinds of regulations. We need different product answers to how we talk about privacy and manage this. We need whole new approaches to privacy. And I think I agree with all of that in principle, but it does seem to me that what you have to argue for in there is for some period of time, what we're going to have is nothing. And that actually this like latent awareness of there is something going on with my privacy on this website is so not helpful that we would literally be better off for some period of time, maybe a long period of time given the way that privacy regulation is going right now, with nothing. Do you feel that way?
Yeah, I absolutely do. I think that as you kind of just spelled out for me, the compliance regime that tech companies and regulators have reached a state of stasis over, which is cookie banners, right? They've all agreed this does two things. It takes the pressure off the regulator from their constituents because every time someone comes to them and says we have a privacy problem, cookie banners, you know, we have a privacy problem with ad tracking, they say we've been doing this for 25 years. We've solved this problem.
And importantly, you clicked the button, right?
And you clicked the button. Don't you feel like you have agency? And you know, you have not only agency, you have transparency. And so there is this panacea that gets created from the regulatory side and then that's also supported by the compliance regime that the tech companies have reached.
They've invested the money. They've invested the research in all of their lawyers for the last 15 to 25 years of deciding what it means to comply with these European laws. They've done the thing and it doesn't cost them that much to do this anymore. They just do it now and they know that that will keep them mostly from being fined or whatever else. And so they have no desire to reinvent the wheel either. That's a whole new lift for them, right? That's a whole new lift.
It's like right now they've solved a problem that doesn't actually block them from tracking that much. First of all, that's really important. Because as I talk about in the paper, this technology of cookies being used as tracking is still used around the margins. I don't want to make it sound like it's completely outdated. There are still ad trackers that use this, but it has been lapped many times over by other types of technology. And so at this point there is just kind of not, there's really no, there's absolutely no incentive on the part of industry to push for anything new.
So you have this very kind of, having cookie banners in place actually prevents room for discussion of a new solution. Now if you get rid of cookie banners then the vacuum will create a discussion necessarily and I truly believe that that would be advantageous. I don't even care if we come around to like a different kind of consent. I wouldn't love it if we come around again to something like cookie banners.
But man, I just think that the discussion now that we are so much more technologically sophisticated, and now that we have so many different types of actual technology that do this tracking, now that we know what a world looks like where you just have these click-through banners and this idea of manufactured consent, like I mean I think that we can do better and I think it would open up like a pathway for innovation and I think that it would get us some new regulation that actually did the hard work of protecting users' privacy.
Okay. Yeah, I love the phrase manufactured consent because it feels like all of this sits right next to the terms of service and the privacy policies and all of the other things that we click the check boxes on when we sign up for things and no one ever reads them. And you cite this great experiment that somebody did where they put a bunch of like nonsensical, what was it, like you agree to give up your firstborn child in the terms of service and everybody just clicked it anyway because nobody reads the terms of service. And it does feel like this whole system is broken.
But the thing that I wonder is like if you made people, if you forced people to read carefully the terms of service before they signed up for something, A, no one would do it. They would just bail on whatever the thing is they were about to sign up for. And B, I'm not actually sure it would accomplish all that much if everybody read the terms of service, right? Like I'm sure you follow these as much as I do. These times when everybody like every four years everybody freaks out about the Instagram terms of service even though it never changes and most of what it's asking you for is actually perfectly plausible, like we need to be able to store one image on multiple servers and so we need permission to copy your image, and everybody freaks out about what that means because nobody understands these things because they don't have to, because they're not lawyers, that's not their job.
But what I wonder is like, is there any version of this where you can give people the actual responsibility to consent with full knowledge and actually give them that full knowledge? Like part of me just wonders, I can't even imagine what the better version of this looks like and I wonder what you think it might look like.
Yeah. So, first of all, I have to credit the fact that this is a response to a really great article in the same journal by Robin Bradley-Kaufman and Jui, which is 'The Contractual Death and Rebirth of Privacy.' And their thesis that this is a response to is really talking about what you're describing and what I describe with the terms of service stuff, which is it's not just a cookie banner problem.
The idea that we are constantly confronted with all of this legalese and these unknowable terms of service and these unreadable privacy notices is not new and something that people have bemoaned for a long time, the so-called clickwrap kind of contracts that have proliferated. And I end the piece in part with this idea that my friend and colleague Dave Hoffman has written about and who calls for fewer forms, like just get rid of, make there be less so that we can concentrate on what is there. So that's part of why I kind of call for this.
But the idea is essentially that the world that we're living in has this kind of constant ability to barrage you with information and to use these kinds of nice ideas of consent and transparency. And it's very hard to actually be empowered even with transparency and even with kind of moments of agency because of how power works in these systems.
And I mean that's a high-level theoretical kind of framing of this. But to answer your question like what could possibly be better, there are a few kind of things that I float at the bottom of it. You could do some of this with, there's some middleware solutions, there's some browser-level solutions that I think could be better to inform people about these types of problems. I think it would be good to have a much more serious, much more technologically sophisticated conversation about the harms that non-PII data sharing actually creates.
I think that there is a lot of ick and creepiness that people just generally don't like about behavioral advertising, but I don't think that there's actually cognizable, especially not tort-based kind of harms that you could actually concretely show that are not based on a leak of personal identifiable information. In Europe there are dignity harms and other types of things, but in the US it would be much harder to kind of show that there are actually harms in this capacity.
And so I think that we just need to have some really hard conversations about that and have like a little bit of creativity about how we do this. Maybe we start kind of creating some type of, I don't know, some type of payment back to users in some type of way for the data that they provide. Maybe we do it economically instead of like giving them cookie banners. Like I don't know, but it would end up being like a five-cent check to you, like it costs more to print and mail than probably your data is worth. But my point is like we could have some conversations about this.
And I think the conversation has just gotten so much more sophisticated in 25 years, in 15 years, in the last 5 years since the techlash kind of started and shifted during COVID when we all kind of went online, there has just been a huge change in how we're doing this. And so I don't have perfect solutions. I just think that there are a few out there that I think would be slightly better than this and even those are worth discussing in light of how terribly this is going.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one thing I was thinking about is the Apple tracking popup that when an app wants to collect that data about you, it puts up this very simple thing and you can either say allow or you can say ask app not to track. And that, at least as far as I can tell, has had a very different outcome than the cookie banners, which is that a lot, maybe most people click ask app not to track because it just makes very clear the thing that's happening.
And part of me wonders if there's a version of cookie banners that should just look more like that. You sort of trace the evolution of cookie banners in a way that I find really interesting from relatively straightforward simple things telling you what's going on and giving you opt out to now it's like, you know, there's a bunch of buttons and a ton of legalese and the only thing that makes any plausible sense to do is just hit agree so the thing will close.
And part of me wonders like if we were to just wind it all the way back to like this thing is collecting a bunch of data about you, cool or not cool, and you can actually just click the button and we've mandated the way that this thing looks. Again, there are weird regulatory questions about like do we want the EU to regulate web design? I don't know. But is there something there that could have worked if we had not let these banners become the bizarre things that they've turned into?
Yeah. So, one thing that I think is fascinating is just like, and I talk about this term and I'll just kind of refresh it for your listeners. I talk about the Brussels effect, which is the so-called effect of what gets legislated or regulated by Brussels, which is the capital of the European Union, becomes de facto policy for these transnational companies because it is easier to comply. It has extraterritorial effect, so like me sitting in New York City is impacted by European law even though I'm technically not, it's not enforceable against me.
Simply because for Google or Apple or Facebook to have different types of policy between Dublin and the US is too expensive and so it's easier to just make a one-size-fits-all solution. We had a similar thing with like, I don't know, you've maybe heard of the Texas-California schoolbook effect where like those two giant markets determine the available textbooks for school children for most of the country, right? Or the California car emissions effect, which is kind of like when California passed emissions laws that just changed how all cars were manufactured in the United States.
Because making a car for California and making a car for the other 49 states, it just doesn't make any sense.
Makes no sense. Right. Exactly. So, this is like this extraterritorial effect that's well kind of established, this play between markets and regulation. What's kind of interesting and I think is kind of funny is that in Europe they have their own thing called the California effect.
And so, you said something just now that I think is kind of interesting. You're like, well, should Brussels, should Europe get to dictate what our privacy design looks like? And what's really funny is that they have something called the California effect, which is they basically think that the US and California in particular, Silicon Valley, has basically colonized all of Europe with this idea by exporting and making Europe completely reliant on their unilateral decisions around design and technology, like what's available in the rules, what's in the terms of service, what you see, what you don't, how you use it. It's all set just like unilaterally by US tech companies. There's no say that Europe has.
It's like completely, they're totally right. I wouldn't know if I would go so far, and it's kind of rich actually coming from Europe to like call it colonization, but it is definitely like a product outsourcing effect, it's a market effect. And to this extent I actually think that there is some legitimacy in Europe deciding that it's going to use its democratic power, its own sovereignty, its own comparatively small but still like next largest richest market share to push back on kind of this dominance from tech companies.
So I just kind of wanted to complicate that narrative a little of like, well why should we be listening to the EU? And I'm like, well, they'd say the same about us. Like, why should we have to listen to everything that Apple just decides at its whim?
And to get just really quickly to that question of Apple deciding that they were not going to play ball with others, they were going to make this change in their ad trackers. There is also another part of that, that if you talk to other technology companies, it devastated other people's advertising revenues and the ability to kind of, I mean, it is a story of monopoly power and a story of that we have too many large players in the ad space and just not enough diversity in who kind of controls the ad sale market.
And so the fact that Apple could unilaterally decide to just completely disrupt this by just like a whim of a policy change, more so than or in the same way, to the same effect, maybe to greater effect than cookie banners did, is I think a great, I would, if I have a part two, maybe like if this is like the Empire Strikes Back version of this article, maybe I'll write about Apple's decision to kind of change its ad tracking system.
Because yeah, it's a great point. I think that all of this is just kind of, let's play all of these powers and forces against each other, but let's not forget who they should be operating for ideally, which is the end user and the citizen. And I think that that just gets forgotten all the time. And so that is like the biggest part of this piece, which is like it's just such a terrible experience for us and it doesn't do anything to protect us and so this is like the worst of all worlds. This doesn't serve us at all, us being like the citizens and the people who are using this technology.
Yeah, I agree. So you mentioned the EU has sort of reopened the case here a bit on cookie banners, is rethinking and what was the word, simplifying, is that what they said they were doing?
Simplifying their policy around data protection.
Do you think there's a real chance of actual honest-to-god change here?
Yeah, I do. The main thing is that I have heard that this is something that is on the table, that they are really, really thinking about this because it is unclear, especially with agentic AI, with kind of how AI is going to work through browsers and how it's going to be kind of like using data, that the idea of cookie banners becomes particularly nonviable.
And there's already a compressed need for server space and everything. I talk a little bit about how there's a waste of energy. There's not a ton of great data on that, but it seems frankly like a little bit commonsensical to me that even if it's just like on the margins that constantly having to ping back and forth has to make some type of difference in type of energy costs and things like that. It certainly makes a difference in time costs for users.
But in any event, there seems like there's some appetite for this. And so like I'm just kind of fingers crossed that this becomes something that people take seriously. But yeah, I guess I kind of wanted to, I just, I don't know. It would be fun to have a win in some capacity at this current juncture when it just feels like there isn't a lot, and this just seemed like a small area that I could focus on or do something or kind of put some advocacy and wisdom into.
Yeah, and so I kind of, I'm an optimistic person. I also never, by the way, ever am like a person who says we should burn it all down. So this is like, I'm not a critic. Like I'm the kind of person who very much is always trying to build something. But yeah, I don't know. I think that basically that actually makes what I'm calling for even easier. Like we don't have to come up with a new solution. Like I think I make the case pretty well that we'd just be better with nothing. And so that's all you need.
And that in fact maybe we can't come up with a new solution until we burn this one down.
Exactly. Exactly. My favorite thing about this is I think it is like, it's such a sort of complicated fascinating regulatory moment, but also that idea has got to have damn near 100% support among actual users of the internet. Like if there are people out there who are like, 'God, I love cookie banners,' I want to hear from you. I have so many questions for you.
I've never met a person who has come to me and said, 'They're fine.' I think the most that I've ever, in presenting this idea, which I've presented for, you know, I've gone on rants about this for the last two years before I wrote this paper because I'm, you know, I'm me, but there is like, and it takes a long time to write academic papers, but the main thing is that people mostly say those are just not that bad. That is the main takeaway that I get. Like they just seem like a small cost. And my point is like they're just not. They're actually not.
It's, you know, it's I don't know. It's kind of like when you have some type of something broken in your home. I don't know. Like you can't turn on the light switch, the bulb burned out in your overhead light and so you have to walk all the way across the room in the dark and you always bump your shins on the coffee table on your way there if you come home after dark to turn on the light on the other side of the room. And you know at some point you should just kind of get up on a ladder and change that stupid light bulb in the ceiling.
But it's a little more effort and by the time you remember to do it like you're on to other things and so you just keep walking across the living room. It's like, well, you just don't have to have bruised shins, my dude. You just don't have to do it. Like your life could be as simple as a light switch. And so, I don't know. That's kind of how I feel about this kind of problem. And yeah.
'You don't have to have bruised shins' is such a good rallying cry for the future of the internet. I like it very much. All right, Kate, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Ask Maps and AI for the real world. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. The Verge's senior reviewer Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.
We are back with another edition of Ruining Allison's Life with Phones.
Very excited about this. We've started something. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's real. No, you said this, you coined this phrase like a while ago and it's gotten stuck in my head. I'm like, that's my whole job. I just ruin my life with phones.
It's, I mean it's great, but every once in a while it goes super well for you.
And that is what we're here to talk about.
I'm particularly curious about Ask Maps and Gemini and Google Maps and this whole thing because a theory I have long held is that Google Maps is actually the perfect example of the trade we make with technology all the time. And I want to talk about it, but I think it is like particularly true in an AI world that if you want to talk about what we give up and what we get back, maybe the fairest trade in all of technology is mapping apps.
But first, I just want you to describe what Ask Maps is. For anybody who doesn't know, this is a thing that if you haven't used Google Maps in a minute, open up the app. There is probably a little shimmery thing telling you to use Ask Maps. What is this feature?
So, it's essentially just Gemini kind of chatbot inside of Google Maps. Yeah, you tap the little thing that says Ask Maps. You get the text box screen and it's like, where do you want to go? Do you want to plan a date night or whatever, and you just kind of freestyle and you ask about the things around you and it will go into, importantly, like Google user reviews and it can pull from a lot of those to answer your questions.
It can also answer questions when I was like planning a little excursion, like should I bring an umbrella, and it'll go check the weather. So it has some of those like all-around Gemini capabilities, but it's more grounded and like more focused in the information in Google Maps.
So how does this track with how you normally use Google Maps? Because I think there are lots of different kinds of Maps users. Did this sort of track with the way you already use the app?
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I'm like a recreational Google Maps user, okay, which I recognize is unusual. There's a lot of, you know, Google Maps is designed to get you from point A to point B. And there's a lot of people who use it that way and probably are less interested in like having just a little chat with Google Maps.
Right? You're like, I have an address. I need to be at that address. Google Maps, tell me how to do that. That is one very specific use of Google Maps.
Yeah. I ask, you know, there would kind of like I want to check out, you know, the neighborhood where we're going to have dinner and see like, well, maybe there's like a cool playground we can stop at. Or I'll see a recommendation somewhere else for a restaurant or a coffee shop. I'll go in and add it to one of my many lists that I have in Google Maps.
So I just poke around in Maps sometimes. Sometimes I have no agenda. I'm just like, I don't know what's gonna pop up in Google Maps today. Something weird inevitably comes up and I'm fascinated. I could spend hours in Google Maps.
So the reason I ask is because I use it exactly the same way. And immediately the first time I read about Ask Maps, I was like, 'Oh, this is for me.' Because like what I find myself doing all the time, I think I've actually until now been using Google Maps sort of wrong, where like I will search for my, honestly hand to god, my most common Google Maps search is probably the phrase breakfast sandwich.
Because wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I am permanently on the lookout for like a pretty good bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. It is all I want every day in the whole world. And Google Maps has always been almost right for that, but never quite right for that.
And it'll always be like, you know, reviews mention X, reviews mention breakfast sandwich, which is sort of helpful, but only if people are reviewing the words breakfast sandwich. And this is the sort of thing that actually, if you take AI and its ability to do this like summarization and sort of fuzzy search and actually pull a bunch of sources together, it can start to do things like actually help you understand what is good on the menu at the place that you're going to and whether this thing and this thing are both good. Like I want a place that has both a good breakfast sandwich and a pretty good cup of coffee.
And that is a thing Google Maps is just structurally not set up to do. So the idea of like you said, we had this huge corpus of place data, reviews. It's actually an incredibly useful amount of information. This seems sort of perfectly suited to everything that Gemini is actually good at. Like, and it sounds like you use Google Maps the same way. Whereas like this immediately becomes the kind of thing you're like, 'Oh, I actually know a thousand questions I would like to ask this AI tool.'
Yeah. And it is really good for those kind of like, I'm not just looking for coffee near me. There's one million coffee shops around me. I'm like, I have...
Or you get the same 12 from everything you do. Right. This is the problem that I constantly have is you search like, I live in Alexandria, Virginia, and it's like top 10 coffee places in Alexandria, Virginia, and it's the same 10 every single place you look. And eventually all of these lists are useless. And I'm like, I've been to all 10 of these. Where else should I go?
Yeah. Like nothing is able to do that so far.
Yes. Yeah. For us recreational maps users, it can put together concepts or like extrapolate from something where I'm like, I'm looking for a coffee shop where I can bring my laptop to work for the afternoon and it understands, you know, some of the criteria around that and it doesn't just look for people mentioned in user reviews, you know, laptop, and it'll be like, there's a lot of space. It's very cozy. It's open till 4:00 p.m., you know, it doesn't close at 2, right? So yeah, kind of coming across those use cases has sort of blown my mind and I'm like, well, now I have a thousand more questions I need to ask.
I love it. So, you set up an experiment where you basically decided to let Gemini plan a lovely city day for you. Tell me about the planning process before we get into the day. What was the setup like?
So, I just kind of gave it the assignment and I gave it a few criteria. I was like, I want to, you know, spend a day in the city. I want somewhere to get lunch. I'm going to be taking public transit. I want to take like a nice little walk somewhere and find a coffee shop where I can sit with my laptop and work for a few hours. And I need to be home by 4:30 p.m. I want to have a lovely city day. And I'm also on a very tight sketchbook. Yes. And I have extremely specific criteria for it. It would be the most intense thing to like tell your friend, right? Yeah. Google Maps though. Yeah, just kind of put it all together. The first suggestions it gave me were I guess maybe too good because I was like, 'Oh, I've been there.' You know, like I know about that coffee shop. I was there a week ago.
So, I will say, by the way, this is one thing I've noticed about Gemini and the Ask Maps feature in my own use so far. I wish it was paying more attention to where I've been before because I've had the same experience a couple of times now where I'm like, 'Oh, where should we go? Like, what's a good... I want tacos. Like, surprise me. Where should we go get tacos?' And pretty consistently it has offered me places I've already been for tacos, which on the one hand is fine, but I've had to really push it to be like, show me things you know for sure I don't know anything about. And then there are a couple on the flip side where it's like... I was like, one thing I put in just this morning to see is like, find me a favorite place I haven't been in a while that I should go back to, which is again information Google Maps has like... Anyone who is wondering what Google Maps knows about you, go find your location history on Google Maps. The answer is everything.
Yeah. And again, this is the trade we make, right? Is like by having this, you can now give all of this back to me in a way that is actually useful to me. And I wish there was one more turn of Google's ability to know because then it offered me a place I've never actually been, but I have searched for in the past. And I was like, you've searched for this twice and you were there one time and I was like, actually, I wasn't. I was somewhere else across the street and you should know that, Google. But so that's the one little tick of personalization that I don't feel like is quite there. And it sounds like you had the same thing where it's like, I want to go on a fun, exciting, new exploratory day and it's like, have you heard of the coffee shop down the street from your house? It's like, I have actually. Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah, I did have to push it a little bit and maybe I sort of thought like fun adventure day out of the house sort of implied like let's not go to my usual spots. But I did have to specify. I was like, no, you know, these are good. I didn't want to, you know, be mean to Google Maps. I was like, 'Good job.' You're doing your best and I love that. I recognize you're doing your best here. Let's like think a little differently about this. And it came up with a couple spots I'd never been to, you know, I'd sort of heard of. They weren't like hidden gems or anything like that. They were sort of like places people know about that I just hadn't gotten around to going.
That seems fine. I'm actually okay with that being kind of the criteria, right?
Yeah. So it charted me a little route, you know, and it gives you little shortcuts to access the transit directions along the way. It gives you a map so you can see generally like what your route is going to look like.
So it'll spit out like a full itinerary for you. I'm just realizing I have not done this ambitious a search with you yet.
Oh, cool. Okay. I had trouble finding a way to like export that to something. It was like, 'Oh, no. I can't do that for you.' So, I had to keep going into my like history with the search and pull it up, which is sort of a pain.
What a basic product miss from Google on that. It's like, gosh, if only you had a system that could show me several stops and navigate between them, Google.
Yeah. The number of times I've asked Gemini like, 'Put this in a Google Doc.' And it's like, 'Oh, no, no, I can't do that for... what are those?' Yeah. I've never heard of that.
Yeah. Even when it can. I'm like, you have access to my whole life. Come on.
Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. So it sent me to a taco shop up the street. Well, a little ways up in, you know, the neighborhood to a big park. It's called Volunteer Park for my scenic walk and then back down like coming closer to home to my final stop at a coffee shop. And it had all of the like, you know, you'll have an hour and a half here. Then you'll need to head for the bus stop. It's a couple blocks away and that, you know, the 350 bus should get you home by 4:30. So it was pretty complete that it was considering all of my various specific weird criteria.
So how much time do you feel like this process saved you? Like I think the question of, you know, find me a coffee shop I would not have found on or I haven't been to before but people are kind of out there. You can do that, right? Like that's a piece of information that is not completely inaccessible to you. But I think it seems like there is something to the combination of it'll put a bunch of those things in there for you. And I think particularly in your situation it seems like you were open to new things and you weren't like find me the greatest experience I've ever had. It's just like just build me a day, let's go have fun. And then there's that actual sort of stitching together of all of it for you that seems like it might have genuinely turned a process that would take you a while into a process that happened pretty automatically. But do you feel like it actually saved you some time to do it this way?
I think it did. I mean, I got home on time and that's not... I'm usually rushing. You know, I'm usually a little too optimistic about like, oh, you know, it usually takes like 40 minutes to get home on the bus. I can do it in 25.
Yeah. Somehow magically I'm going to be able to do this faster.
They say that's like a predictive personality trait. If you are optimistic about being able to do everything, then it is reasonably possible to do it.
