Jason Hong's Confabulations

I was just asked to write up some tips for managing privacy on smartphones. I figured this would be generally useful to share with folks on the Internet. 1. Many Android phones track a person's location history. You can check if Google has your location history by logging into your Google account and going to:     https://www.google.com/maps/timeline If you want to turn this feature off, on your smartphone, go to:   Google Settings (app) -> Location -> Location History Or go to:   Settings -> Location -> Google Location History ----------------- 2. You can also choose to opt out of personalized ads. Android phones can share an advertising ID with sites, and this ID can be used to build up a profile of interests. These advertising IDs are just like web browser cookies. If you want to turn this feature off, go to:   Google Settings (app) -> Ads Or go to:   Settings -> Accounts -> Google -> Personal Info & Privacy You can also use this

After using the Droid for about two months, here's my list of things I hope they fix: Text Input Alt and spacebar. You're job is to input a phone number. You hit alt twice to put it into alt mode, so you can type in numbers, and then hit space to separate the groups of numbers. But wait, space in alt mode brings up a list of symbols. Very broken interface. Calendar Why does the calendar show no event information whatsoever whenever it syncs? This is very broken, having to wait 10+ seconds just to see if you can schedule something. Make a better time widget. Why bother giving people the option to start a meeting at 5:29PM? How about 15minute intervals by default, and a separate UI if that's not sufficient. Why does the calendar start at midnight? Make better use of screen real estate, let people set the start of a day at, say, 8AM I can't make an event in the calendar repeat every Tue and Thu from the phone? I have to go to the Google Calendar web site to do this? Didn&#

The Droid phones are really amazing in terms of functionality, though the biggest surprise for me is comparing the usability of the Droid vs the HTC Hero. I've never liked virtual keyboards, so the Droid handily wins out here for me. However, the virtual desktop feels clunky on the Droid, but surprisingly useful on the Hero. In part, this is because the Hero comes with gorgeous widgets already set on the virtual desktop, providing easy access to photos, calendar, messages, and so on. These widgets are also far more useful than others I've looked for in the Android marketplace. (I poked around to see if I could transfer the HTC widgets over to the Droid, but alas! It looks like these widgets requires additional software in the background. I'm hoping HTC will sell their widgets on the Android marketplace, but I doubt it since their goal is probably to differentiate their product so as to sell more hardware). At any rate, if anyone knows of a good calendar app for Android, ple

Note to self: to view the contents of the Android SD card on a PC, you plug it into the USB port and then in the Android notifications screen, choose to Mount it. Once you do this, though, you can't read or write to the SD card on the Android phone itself until it is unmounted. Total elapsed time to figure this out: 46 minutes.