Couldn’t they still get a location from the user’s IP address?
One example I saw is that a user was near panicking because when asked if the AI had access to their location, the AI said it didn’t. However, it was able to tell them the nearest McDonalds. Just thinking, if I had your IP (e.g. the source IP of a request to my server), I could find a “nearest” McDonalds.
So it claims it doesn't have the user's location. Then when it needs to use the user's location to do something it does have the users location without asking for it because something something IP address might be how it has the information it stated unequivocally it did not have.
It either does not have it or it is lying. Clearly snapchat is lying here. No wiggle room. None.
Snapchat, is using the software to tell snapchat customers deliberate lies.
Normally that sort of thing brings the lawyers but this is "with a computer" so does that mean it's somehow ok?
That makes some sense for PCs connected to some kind of landline, but IMHO if you have the source IP of a mobile device running Snapchat, in most setups you'd only be able to determine their cell phone network provider, the IP address seen upon exiting the mobile network control plane shouldn't expose the cell tower or anything else, the IP connections (and thus the address) of the device should even stay the same as it moves from one city to another.
I’ve seen that and also seen that if you ask it for the nearest Mcdonald’s and then ask how it got that it will say it used your IP address. I haven’t seen anyone test it by spoofing their IP, yet.
For analytics purposes, indeed IP isn't used for that reason (although nowadays IP is sparsely used at all in analytics due to legal PII risks), but for responses to a "what's nearby?", it'll generally be relevant despite the possibility of VPNs.
The alternative that I use is to use GnuCash and periodically download CSVs from my bank of my transactions. That way I don't have to manually enter transactions and don't have to give my bank login to some random third party.
All that's needed is about 15-30 minutes every couple of months to bring in the latest transactions and double check the categorizations. GnuCash uses double entry bookkeeping, so you always know if your data is accurate or not by being able to reconcile the accounts.
If I had a great idea, I'd build it. I do think if you could reduce the friction of adding a transaction to very, very low (maybe adding a transaction through a combination of voice and location-awareness?), I'd consider giving it a shot.
It's a tall wall to climb, and there isn't an obvious ladder lying around.
I'd use an website/app that supports my preferred data ingestion process -- periodically manually downloading my bank & credit transactions (supporting at least one of: csv, qif, and qfx), and allows me to define at least (account, category, description) tuples mapping transaction to buckets (ideally hierarchical).
(Ideally also a focus on viewing trends at various grains and easy drill down, as opposed to "don't buy any more smoothies for the next 11 days, but go ahead and rent more movies soon -- use it or lose it!".)
I see gnucash mentioned as an option for ingesting downloaded transactions. Any others?
I believe the various plain text accounting tools (ledger, hledger, beancount) have tools that allow for this. I haven't used them as I use gnucash but they may be worth a look.
Thanks for mentioning this. I've been procrastinating on finding an alternative since they hiked the price up so much (not even my grandfathered $45/year pricing is immune!). It looks a lot like YNAB from the screenshots, but I'll give it a shot to see just how similar it really is. Being self-hostable is just icing on the cake!
After never being totally happy with Ubuntu or Pop!_OS and flip-flopping between them and Windows 10, I eventually decided to try Fedora. It has been great, and I have no interest in trying anything else.
One example I saw is that a user was near panicking because when asked if the AI had access to their location, the AI said it didn’t. However, it was able to tell them the nearest McDonalds. Just thinking, if I had your IP (e.g. the source IP of a request to my server), I could find a “nearest” McDonalds.