We've detected
that you are in a hotel room late at night, with a woman who is not your wife, the atmosphere is hot and steamy, yet you are flaccid. Would you like to buy ch34p3r \/1@grA?
Google wants to deliver adverts based on the environment around people, as well as their behavioural profile, and has filed for a patent on the concept. The premise of US patent 8,138,930 is that a phone, or other device, can detect a lot more than the current location of the user, it often knows the local temperature as well …
They can get your location by cell triangulation or GPS and hit publicly available online weather stations for current conditions at that location. Then they can serve ads based on this data. What seems to be the most obvious thing they can determine about your local conditions via temperature and light sensors on the phone itself is whether or not the phone is in your pocket. I'm sure there will be some evil intent but at the moment I just can't see what it is.
As soon as my contract obligation runs out I'm going to dump my Android phone in favor of a cheap "feature phone."
FSCK YOU, Google.
Not that I pay any attention to adverts anyway but I really resent being tracked by anyone who doesn't have a court order to look into my dull, uninteresting life.
"Google, however, is in the advertising business and busy applying some of the best minds of a generation to the problem of how to make us click on more ads"
One can argue whether a mind that occupies itself with the problem of how to make us click on more ads is actually a good mind, or merely a technically-skilled-in-certain-areas-but-otherwise-contemptible mind.