Transcript

Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast

From The Verge · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 17 min · 15,130 words · 189 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast", an episode of The Verge published April 7, 2026 (1 h 17 min, about 15,130 words). It mentions 42 people, works and ideas, including Vergecast, The Verge, Google Maps, Ask Maps, Terry Pierce.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Vergecast, Kate Clonic, The Verge, Ask Maps
  2. – 30:00: California
  3. – 40:00: Google Maps, Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Gemini
  4. – 50:00: Google Maps, Gemini, Ask Maps, Ask Maps
  5. – 1:00:00: Google Maps, Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Gemini
  6. – 1:10:00: Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Volunteer Park, Vergecast
  7. – 1:16:52: Google Maps, The Brick, Spotify, The Verge

Notable quotes from "Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast"

  • 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. I know I told.
    about Vergecast · at
  • 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…
    about The Verge · at
  • 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.
    about GDPR · at
  • 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 techn technologically sophisticated such…
    about ML · at
  • Yeah. Yeah. 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.
    about Apple Inc. · at
  • Like the you know the available textbooks for school children for most of the country right or the Europe or the California car emissions effect which is kind of like when car…
    about California · at
  • Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this?
    about Shopify · at
  • Support for the show comes from Upwork.
    about Upwork · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Terry Pierce — Person · Host · 1 mention · first at
    Led the discussion on various topics including smartphones and AI integration.
    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. I know I told you I was done…
  • Kate Clonic — Person · Main guest · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed the impact and future of cookie banners and privacy regulations.
    Today's show is about two things. First, Kate Clonic, 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,.
  • Brian Johnson — Person · Guest · 2 mentions · first at
    Shared her experience with the Ask Maps feature and its implications.
    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…

Companies & orgs

  • The Verge — Organization · Affiliated organization · 2 mentions · first at
    The media organization producing the Vergecast podcast.
  • Apple Inc. — Company · Referenced company · 1 mention
    Discussed in the context of privacy features and tracking policies.
  • OpenAI — Company · Referenced company · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of AI discussions.
    And Travis Larchuk. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, Open AI stuff going on. There's some wild stuff happening in politics and the world and the…
  • Fullbright — Organization · Referenced organization · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of Kate Clonic's research in Europe.
    So, I was living in Europe. I was on a fullbrite at 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.
  • Eater — Organization · Referenced organization · 1 mention
    Mentioned as a source for restaurant reviews and recommendations.
    Reviews restaurants or is sort of a curator for maybe a website like Eater which I read all the time.

Products & tech

  • Google Maps — Product · Core topic · 26 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a tool integrated with AI to enhance user experience through the Ask Maps feature.
    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.
  • Ask Maps — Product · 12 mentions · first at
    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.
  • Side Phone — Product · 1 mention · first at
    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.
  • Shopify — Product · 3 mentions · first at
  • Upwork — Product · 3 mentions · first at
  • Boox Palma 2 — Product · 1 mention
  • TCL NXTPAPER phone — Product · 1 mention
  • Apple App Tracking Transparency (ATT) prompt — Product · 1 mention
  • Boox Palma 2 Pro — Product · 1 mention
  • Upwork Business Plus — Product · 1 mention
  • TikTok — Product · 2 mentions · first at
    Phone, I think it gets a little yeah, you could just turn it off and scroll TikTok if you want. so I think that's where maybe people would be interested in like give me the…
  • The Brick — Product · 2 mentions · first at
    Might be something, especially if it is like a switch you have to throw. have you used the brick at all? The little device people use to try and disconnect.
  • Apple iPhone — Product · 1 mention
  • Apple iPhone Air — Product · 1 mention
  • Android — Product · 1 mention · first at
    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.
  • Google Photos — Product · 1 mention · first at
    To like my family where I'm it knows my child's name. I've put my kids I've tagged my kid in Google Photos and you do that you can even do that little game where it's Is this your kid?
  • Spotify — Product · 2 mentions · first at
    Any number of like little things that you do all day every day like scroll through Spotify. Those things are annoying. And it's one thing when you have it as a secondary device that is very deliberately like this is mostly for reading.
  • Fairphone — Product · 1 mention · first at
    The only and it's not E in it reminded me of the monochrome E in type thing. Fairphone has that little mode you switch into which is more like Yeah.
  • BlackBerry (physical keyboard phone) — Product · 1 mention
  • Slack — Product · 1 mention
  • Yelp — Product · 1 mention
  • Miro — Product · 1 mention
  • OpenAI — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

  • Ask Maps — Concept · Core topic · 12 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a new feature in Google Maps using AI to enhance user interaction.
    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.
  • Artificial Intelligence — Concept · Core topic · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed in the context of enhancing Google Maps and other technologies.
    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.
  • Gemini — Concept · Core topic · 10 mentions · first at
    Integrated with Google Maps to provide AI-driven features like Ask Maps.
    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.
  • GDPR — Concept · Core topic · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed in relation to cookie banners and privacy regulations in Europe.
  • ML — Concept · Referenced concept · 1 mention
    Mentioned in the context of AI and technology discussions.

Places & events

  • California — Place · Referenced location · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed in the context of privacy regulations and the California effect.
  • Volunteer Park — Place · Referenced location · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed as part of a planned day using Ask Maps.
    Shop up the street. Well, a little ways up in, 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 you know,.
  • Paris — Place · Referenced location · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the location where Kate Clonic conducted her research.
    So, I was living in Europe. I was on a fullbrite at 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.

Media & podcasts

  • Vergecast — Podcast · Platform · 5 mentions · first at
    The platform where the discussion about AI, Google Maps, and privacy took place.

Sponsors

  • Shopify Inc. — Company · Advertiser · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a sponsor of the podcast episode.
    Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right.
  • Upwork — Company · Advertiser · 3 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a sponsor of the podcast episode.
    Support for the show comes from Upwork.

Full transcript with timestamps

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 is called the side phone. And the idea is basically it's like a 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 a 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 Clonic, 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. Vergecasterge.com is the email about smartphones. We're going to talk a little bit about smartphones. It's 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 lowgrade 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 pulled 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 Clonic, who is a professor at St.

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 Clonic, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me. I brought you here to talk about cookies. Um, the the scourge of the internet. Um, and I I 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 fullbrite uh at in Paris to research the digital services act. Um, 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 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 of clicking through and this this block to me getting to this very simple thing that I wanted like a currency conversion or 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 it this screed, um the European Commission decided to re-evaluate the um the law, the underlying regulations that had kind of been part of the genesis of of why 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 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 um it's either 15 or kind of 25 years old. Um and to explain that you kind of have to look at like the origins of the EU's e- privacy directive and there was a lot of agitation um when there was a certain merger um that now it's kind of you know pass 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 um 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 was that people were concerned about was all of this was running and kind of this interesting artifact of the internet which is a cookie. Um and I as I say in the article um 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. Um it it basic 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 uh makes it usable at all for the user. Um, 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. Um, 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. I 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. Um 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 we went to the and the EU decided to take it up. And the EU has a very different fundamental framework for how they how they regulate around privacy um than the US, which made it more plausible that they could pass something like this and that it could take um effect in all of Europe. And so that's what they did um in the e privacy uh directive. And so the interesting thing was that it didn't there's nothing in that piece of regulation that says anything about a banner, anything about a popup, anything about

um notice. Um 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 um that like it is what it is. But it this is like a perfect example of like it says that it was that the directive was about the purpose of the processing and is offered the user has to have 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 um even though the the 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 uh through industry. So that's why I also want to say there's two things. There's a misunderstanding that is just the GDPR that kind of put like cookie banners on steroids. cookie banners. 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 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 but like very specifically this regulation did not necessarily have to turn out this way. And it is a part I think that like it's I think that industry deserves as much blame in this being their solution to it um as you know potentially if you want to put blame on people which I don't really think is worth doing the you know the 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 they're it's not even they were just like completely neutral and they did nothing than fine, but that they're not. And so that's actually kind of the the big takeaway.

Yeah. I want to I want to interrogate the we'd be better off without them argument a little bit because I think uh and 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 the letter of the law sort of literally and figuratively and and get away with it and we can we have done our privacy work every everything is fine no one's going to sue us we're not going to get fined by the EU and and it has sort of calcified into this crappy experience that accomplishes nothing but it works and that the 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 different kinds of regulations. We need different product answers to how we talk about privacy and manage this people. We need whole new

approaches to privacy. And I think I I agree with all of that in principle, but it does seem to me that what you what you have to argue for in there is for some period of time, what we're going to have is nothing. and that 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 the as we you kind of as you just spelled out for me the compliance regime that tech companies and regulators have reached the state taunt 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 did all of with we've been doing this for 25 years. We've answer 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?

Um 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 their all of their lawyers for the like last 15 to 25 years of deciding what it means to comply with these European laws. They've done the they've done the thing and it doesn't cost them that much to do this anymore. It's they just do it now and they know that that will keep them mostly from being from being fined or um 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. Um 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 is like it's there there it's been it's been lapped many times over by other types of technology.

And so at this point there is just kind of not um 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 like and I I truly believe that like that would be advantageous. I don't even care if we come around to like a different kind of like consent. I wouldn't 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 techn technologically sophisticated such that 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 it would um get us some new regulation that actually did the hard work of protecting users privacy.

Okay. Yeah, I love the phrase manufacturer consent because it it feels like uh 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 uh you you say this great uh experiment that somebody did where they they put a bunch of like nonsensical what was it like you 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 I'm sure you 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 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 that's not 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 an the actual respons 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 like credit the fact that this is a response to um to a really great article in the same um in the same journal by uh Robin Bradley Carr and Jui uh which is the contractual death and rebirth of privacy and there is I mean it's their their thesis that this is a response to is really talking about what you're describing and what I I describe with the terms of service stuff which is it's not just a cookie banner problem. the idea that we have we are constantly confronted with all of this legal ease and these unknowable terms of service and these unreadable um privacy notices is not new um and not some and something that like people have bemoaned for a long time the so-called click wrap um kind of contracts that have pr proliferated and I end kind of the piece in part with like this idea that um uh my friend and colleague uh Dave Hoffman has written about at and uh who who kind

of calls for fewer forms like just get rid of le like make make it m 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 the idea is essentially that the 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 um and even with kind of moments of agency uh because of how power works um 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 like a few kind of things that I float um at like at the at the 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 nonPI data sharing actually creates. I think that there is a lot of ick and creep 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, you know, h like actually concretely show um that uh that are not based on a leak of personal identifiable information. like that's like being you know that um you know the in Europe there are dignity harms and other types of things but in the US like there's not it's would be much harder to kind of show that there are actually harms in this in this capacity. Um and so I think that we just need to have some really hard conversations about that. Um and that and have like a little

bit of creativity about how we how we do this. Maybe we start kind of creating some type of like I don't know some type of uh payment back to users in some type of way for the data that they provide. Maybe we make you know so maybe we do it economically instead of like giving them cookie banners like I don't know but I mean but end up being like five cent a five- cent check to you like you know that like it costs more to print and mail than probably that than your data is worth. But like but my point is is like we could have some conversations about this. Um 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 tech lash kind of started um and kind and um and shifted during co um when we all kind of went online there has just been a huge um change in how we're doing this. And so I don't have perfect solutions. Um, I just think that uh I

just think that there's there are a few out there that I think would be slightly better than this and um even those are worth discussing. I think um in in light of how terribly this is going.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one thing I was thinking about is the Apple um tracking popup that when when an app wants to collect that data about you, it it puts up this very simple thing and you can either say allow or you can say ask app not to track. Um, 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 is uh it 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 legal ease 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 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 do we want the EU to regulate web design? I don't know. But but is 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. Um I talk about the Brussels effect which is the so-called kind of the the effect of uh what gets legislated or regulated by Brussels which is the capital of the eur European Union becomes de facto policy for these transnational companies because it is easier to comply even if so it has extr territorial effect even so like me sitting in New York City is impacted by European law even though I'm technically not um it's not, you know, it's not enforceable against me simply because um for Google or Apple or Facebook to have different types of policy between Dublin and um and the US is too expensive and so it's easier to just make a one-sizefits-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 like the you know the available textbooks for school children for most of the country right um or the Europe or the or the California car emissions effect which is kind of like when car when California passed emissions laws that just changed how all cars were manufactured in the United States

cuz 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 extr territorial effect that's well kind of established, this play between markets and regulation. Um, 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 like dictate what um 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 the California in particular Silicon Valley has basically colonized all of Europe with this like this idea with by exporting and making Europe completely reliant on their unilateral decisions around design and technology like what's available in 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 as it's like completely they're 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 um there is uh but it's definitely like it is definitely like a a product it's a product outsourcing effect it's a market effect it is you know and to this extent I actually think that there is some legitimacy in Europe deciding that it's going to use its democratic its democratic power its own sovereignty its own mark like comparatively small but still like next largest richest market um market share to push back on kind of this this dominance from tech companies. Um 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 are they why should we be listening to why should why do we have to listen to like everything that, you know, Apple just decides at its whim? And to get just really quickly um to that question of Apple deciding that they were not going to play ball with other um they were going to make this change in their in their ad trackers. Um there is also another part of that that is uh that if you talk to other technology companies devastated other people's advertising revenues and the ability to kind of I mean and is a story of of monopoly power

and a story of uh of that we have too many large players in the and the ad space uh and just not enough um diversity in who kind of controls um the ad sale market And so the fact that Apple could unilaterally decide to just completely disrupt this by just like an a whim of policy change um more so than or in the same way to the same effect maybe to greater effect than cookie banners did is uh I think a great I would if I have a part two maybe like if I make this like if this is like the Empire Strikes Back uh version of this of this article maybe I'll writed about Apple's uh Apple's uh decision to kind of uh 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 we're at the that's 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. Um you know this doesn't serve us at all. Um us being like the citizens and the people who are using this technology.

Yeah I agree. So you mentioned uh the the EU has has sort of reopened the case here a bit on on cookie banners is rethinking and what was the word simplifying is that what they were they said they

simplifying their 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 uh is that I have heard that this is um that this is something that is on the table that they are really really thinking about this because it is unclear especially with um agentic AI with kind of the like 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 um nonviable and um is, you know, there's already a compressed need for for like 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 common sensical to me that even if it's just like on the margins that constantly going having to ping back and forth like has to make some type of difference and kind of in type of energy costs and things like that, it certainly makes a difference in time costs for users. But in any event, like there's so there seems like there's some appetite for this. Um and and so like I'm just kind of fingers crossed that this becomes something that that people take seriously. But yeah, I guess I kind of I wanted to I just I don't know. It would be fun to have a win in some capacity um at this current juncture when it just

feels like there isn't a lot to and this just seemed like a small area that I could focus on or do something or kind of put an advocacy some advocacy and wisdom into. Um 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. Um, so this is like a I'm not a crit. Like I'm the kind of like a person who very much is always trying to build something. But yeah, I don't know. I think that basically that actually makes the call 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 just be better with nothing. And so that's all you

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 so it's it's so 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 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 don't think you exist. I've never met a person who has come to me and said, "They're fine." I think 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 um because I'm you know I'm me um but there is like and it takes a long time to write academic papers um but the the main thing is that people mostly say those are just not that bad. That's the main that is the main takeaway that I get. like they just seem like a small cost. And my point is 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 in your in your your 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 like 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. Um 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, you your life could, you know, your life could be as simple as a light switch. And so, um, I don't know. That's kind of what I feel how I feel about about this kind of this problem. And, um, 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.

Yeah, thank you so much. 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. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this? One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of. From payment processing to analytics to website design, their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, "What if I need help?" Then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's

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upwork.com. All right, we're back. The Veres senior reviewer Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.

Hello. Uh we are back with another edition of Ruining Allison's Life with Phones.

Yes. Very excited about this. We we've started something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's 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 that's my whole job. I just ruined my life with phones. It's I mean it's great, but every once in a while it goes super well for you.

Yeah. And that is what we're here to talk about. Um I'm particularly curious about Ask Maps and Gemini and Google Maps and this whole thing because um 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 a 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 I want you to just 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. Uh what is this feature? So, it's essentially just Gemini kind of chatbot inside of Google Maps. Um, 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? you do you want to plan a date night or whatever and you just kind of freestyle and you ask um about the things around you and it um it will go into like 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'm I was like planning a little excursion like should I bring an umbrella and it'll go check the weather. So it it has some of those like allaround 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 there are lots of different kinds of maps users.

Um are 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 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 like that is one very specific use of Google Maps.

Yeah. asks, 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. Um, or I I'll see a recommendation somewhere else for a restaurant or a coffee shop. I'll go in and and add it to one of my many lists that I have in Google Maps. Um, so some 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 I'm fascinated. I could spend hours in Google Maps.

I So I 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 map search is probably the phrase breakfast sandwich. Uh 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. Um, and Google Maps has always been almost right for that, but never quite right for that.

And it's it'll always be like, you know, reviews mention X XYZ, reviews mention breakfast sandwich, which is sort of helpful, but only if people are reviewing the words breakfast sandwich. Um, 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 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 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 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 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 it can 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 and it'll 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 a it's very um cozy. it's open till 400 p.m., you know, it's not doesn't close at 2, right?

Um, so yeah, kind of coming across those use cases is sort of blown my mind and I'm Yeah, 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 a a lovely city day for you.

Uh, 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 I gave it a few criteria. I was like, I want to, you know, spend a day in the city. I want um somewhere to get lunch. Uh I'm going to be taking public transit. Um I want to take like a nice little walk somewhere. Uh and find a 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. Um it would be the most intense thing to like tell your friend,

right? Yeah. Google Maps though. Um yeah, just kind of put it all together. Um the first suggestions it gave me were I guess maybe too good cuz 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 cuz I've had I've had the same experience a couple of times now where I'm like, "Oh, where 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 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 what 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.

It's frightening. Yeah. And again, and this is this is the 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 I wish there was one more turn of Google's ability to know because then it was like 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. Uh, but so that's the one little tick of personalization that I don't I don't feel like is quite there. And it's 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 I I 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 I didn't want to, you know, be mean to Google Maps. I was like, "Good job." Um,

you're doing your best and I love that. I recognize you're 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. Um so it it charted me a little route, you know, and it gives you little um shortcuts to access the the transit directions along the way. It gives you a map so you can see generally like where 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. Um so it's it sent me to a taco shop um up the street. Well, a little ways up in, you know, the neighborhood to a a a big park. It's called Volunteer Park. Um for my scenic walk and then back down like coming closer to home um to my final stop at a coffee shop. and and it had all of the like, you know, you'll have an hour and a half here. Um then you'll need to head for the the bus stop. It's a couple blocks away and that that um you know, the 350 bus should get you home by 4:30. Um so it was it was pretty complete um that it 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 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 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 in 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 it did. I mean, I got home on time and I that's not I'm usually rushing. You know, I kind of am 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 I can

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 is reasonably possible to do it.

Yeah. You and I share that personality trait. No problem. Are we sociopaths? Is that

I think so. It means you're a terrible person who is not considered of other people's time. Okay. Which is essentially the the readout.

I've always suspected this about myself. Um, no. So, it there was something that helped me, I think, mentally, to just have those numbers in front of me of like, okay, you really got you really should leave at 3:50. Um, and I was like, okay, that's the time I need to leave.

Sort of having that in front of me, I think, was more the benefit. I think it it really did, you know, help a lot with connecting all the dots like especially when I made it kind of a complicated day. But there there was a value to um you know, you look at I look at Google Maps, I'm like I could go anywhere where where how on earth do you pick a place to go? I could go to a beautiful park on the lake. I could go have a totally different kind of experience over here. And then I tend to end up in like my safe zone where I'm like, "Well, I know this neighborhood pretty well. I'm just going to go there." Um, having having a computer be like, "Hey, you're going to tacos Chukis." And I'm like, "Sure." I wasn't really thinking about tacos, but yeah, the computer said um sort of helped me just to like fill in the the blank canvas that that can feel overwhelming, I think.

Yeah. And again, I think that's one of the things Google Maps has never been very good at. And I think I suspect a thing you, as a parent of a young child, do that I also do all the time is try desperately to find things going on around me at any given time.

Uh, and that is something Google Maps is not great at, but neither is anybody else, right? You're like, what fun things are happening around this weekend?

And there's just not a good answer for that anywhere on the internet. Google Maps is probably better at it, but that like the explore tab is not much. But I've had reasonable luck just being like what's what's cool and new and interesting happening and and ask Map seems to just be able to find that more than some of the other things which I think is very cool.

But I do wonder and this comes back to the like how it feels to turn all of this over to the computer thing

there. That question of I am just allowing this thing to decide for me based on what it knows like Google Maps you know Google take the wheel. Uh how did that feel? Like it's obviously it's one thing to do as an experiment, but like in in your in your day-to-day life, is that a thing you'll feel comfortable doing?

I think to different degrees. Like when I'm on my own, you know, left to my own devices, this is definitely a realm where I'm like, yeah, I could use a little help filling in the dots here. I need to do I want to do X, Y, and Z. um where I I see myself using it as more of like um like finding these particular places or like experiences if I'm looking for something to do with my family

in Seattle. We have a new extension for our light rail system that like connects the east side of the city with Seattle proper for the first time. Um so and it's awesome. It actually takes you over Lake Washington. And it's the first light rail system to go over a floating bridge. Who knew? But it was like, "This is rad." Um, where can we go along this this new part of the line? And um it put together some suggestions like, you know, there's a there's a playground in this neighborhood and there's actually like a a viewing platform so you can see the trains go by. Um, so that's kind of what I did with my kid on Saturday. I was like, "Look, bud. We're getting on the light rail and we're just going to like he loves vehicles." Like, this was a very easy sell.

I didn't do the whole like, "We're going to leave here by this time, you know?" I was just kind of like, "Okay, here's a couple of places,

God willing, we'll see how everybody's mood is." Um, but it was very successful. And I don't I I don't think I would have found exactly the same places just kind of like scrolling around on Google Maps the way I am want to.

Yeah. I find with a lot of this stuff and and there's some of this going on on Yelp and other platforms too that there's just a certain amount of filtering and button pressing you get used to doing on all of these platforms that's like, okay, I search for restaurant and then I have to go and I click filters and I click outdoor seating and I click open now and I click and I and it's there's just a bunch of stuff you have to do to sort of take this giant database of stuff and winnow it down to what you want. And the actual better thing is just like I'm I'm with my kid and we need a snack right now.

Yep. Where do I go? And and what you actually need in so many of these cases is just an answer. A successful answer is so much more important than like I'm going to spend 30 minutes finding the perfect place for us to go. And I think

for the most part that is certainly my life experience is like I I would like something pretty good as quickly as possible,

which ironically is the whole pitch of AI. I know, right? Reasonably good as quickly as possible is like the best case scenario story of AI. And I think in Google Maps case, it's actually perfectly suited to a lot of use cases.

Mhm. Um, but I do wonder, and this this is sort of the bigger picture thing I've been thinking about, is there are obviously lots of questions about all of the data that these tools are collecting about you as you move around. There's all these questions about what's it doing with the content that people are creating. like what what does it mean that everybody's everything from like reviews to internet content is being sort of subsumed into this tool that really does not spend a lot of time sourcing its information like in my test so far it is not interested in pointing you back to anything it's just here's a bunch of information go about your day

um even the place information from a lot of these places is just being dumped into these AI systems and this stuff is not unique to Google Maps this is happening in Gemini and everything else elsewhere but what do you make of the the kind of AI in AI out piece of Ask Maps here.

Yeah, I I thought about this a lot because it it sort of mirrors what I do like reviewing phones in a way. You know, if you think about someone who reviews restaurants or um you know, is sort of a curator for maybe a website like Eater um which I read all the time. Um, not a plug for our Vox Media friends.

Shout out to Eater. Shout out to Eater. I genuinely just am always on Seattle Eater. Um, there's sort of that aspect where it's like I, you know, in me in my job, I have the perspective of like I get to use every phone. Like every phone that comes out in this country is for sale. I get to use it and I have that perspective and I can like share based on that. I don't live with one single phone every day. And there are there are better sources of information. Um, if you're looking for like one particular thing about a phone,

which is kind of the beautiful thing about, you know, there's maybe a a Reddit community or um a blog that is like focused on that specific thing. Um, so I kind of got to a place with uh with Ask Maps where I'm like, maybe this is helping me fill in these gaps. You know, I'm still going to read Eater. Um, I'm still interested in a Seattle Times like restaurant review and that sort of informs my like overall understanding of, you know, the the scene in Seattle. Then I have my my weird little specific requests and questions and that's usually answered by other people, you know, not professional restaurant reviewers. And I think there's all kinds of thorny things there with like does does one thing become too powerful and it puts all the restaurant reviewers out of business? I I don't I hope not. you know, I I kind of landed and maybe I'm rationalizing, but I'm I'm sort of at peace with it as far as my own use goes

that I'm it it really helps me fill in the gaps and fill in the like hyper specific stuff where I'm like um that that, you know, an eater is not going to be able to answer. They don't have uh a list of the top 20 restaurants in Seattle for kids who are like super into vehicles. They don't have to be vehicle themed. They can be near, you know, like

a big parking lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Parking lot with some weird cars. We love it.

But and then on the flip side, nor is Google Maps going to be the place to be like, okay, who is doing really interesting, innovative stuff that I should go and like make a point of going to?

Yes. That is Google Maps has never been good at that. and I think has actually tried a bunch of times to be good at that

and mostly failed. And so I think I think you're exactly right falling back to this we are just going to solve this very simple dayto-day problem for you without trying to sort of

be discovery based and help and help kind of curate the best of anything like Google doesn't even really try that anymore and I think it's probably the right decision. There are others who are better at that.

But I think about this also in terms of uh maybe this is just my own moral quandry with Google Maps. But

I am perpetually both using Google Maps for everything and sort of petrified how much Google Maps knows about me.

And it feels like Ask Maps just extends that on both counts, right? Because now if I essentially just allow Google Maps to follow me around everywhere, it's going to know more about me, give me better recommendations, have more history with me. It's the same thing we talk about with all of these like always on recording devices where there's real upside to having it track all of my conversations and what I'm doing and who I'm with and all this stuff. It's also just creepy as all hell when it works. And and I think I I struggle with this all the time with Google Maps just in general. Like I will I will navigate all the way home, but then when I get to like 10 minutes from my house, I close the app because something in me is just like I I know that Google Maps knows where I live, but the idea of it knowing that I've arrived home freaks me out.

And that's that's nonsense. Like to be clear, that doesn't make any sense, but it is how I feel.

Yeah. And then yet on the other side, um, whenever I'm using Google Maps and I'm on the highway and it pops up the thing that's like, you know, 10 people reported police here, police still there, and you can either press still there or not there. I make such a point of hitting that every time

because I'm like, this is and this this goes back to what I'm saying about about the trade earlier. It's like this is

a a staggeringly useful piece of technology, right? to give me the real time traffic information and to tell me where the cops are and to tell me the accident that's coming up and and me around it. Like we give it a vast amount of data about us and about everyone. But in return, we get this incredibly useful tool. And I think I'm very comfortable with that trade of what I get for giving you this information about me. But it does, again, it feels like AI just in general, but especially with location stuff, just makes that so much more acute. I don't know. Is this is this a quandry for you in the same way that it is for me, or am I just way too deep in my own head about this?

No, I I definitely feel it, especially when you bring AI into the equation. It's like I I have decades of history on Google Maps. It probably knows every address I've lived at in the past 20 years or whatever.

Again, go to your location information. It will terrify you. So horrifying. Did Didn't for a while, maybe it still does this and I just unsubscribe, but it would give you like an email digest every month like here's where you went last month. I'm like absolutely not. I'm good.

People super want to be reminded of all of this information that we have about them.

Take a little trip down memory lane. Um, don't love that. Yeah, there is a weird thing with AI, especially when it comes to like um my family where I'm it it knows my child's name. I've put my kids I've tagged my kid in Google Photos and you do that you can even do that little game where it's like, "Is this your kid? Is this a picture of your kid?" And you you ask you say yes or no. AI knows his name. It is a totally different thing when I hear it repeated or like spoken out loud to me. If I'm like talking to Gemini, it's like, "Well, Lennox really loves cars, so you should." It's like, "Whoa whoa whoa."

Yeah. There there is just something about like having it spoken back to you or it's like, "Hey, I know a ton about you." And um maybe it is just a we like that veil of like you know that the data is there but you're not like um presenting it like putting it in my face quite so acutely.

Yeah, it is it is a strange user interface problem as much as anything. It's like how how much can you present to me that you know me

before it starts to seem really creepy. Yeah. I was thinking like I was thinking about this this morning. I went and got uh a breakfast sandwich and a coffee at a place that has good versions of both that is right down the street from me. And part of me is like, well, wouldn't it be great if Google when I dropped the kid off at daycare was just like, "Hey, you're you're you're probably going there again, right? You want to navigate? Let's do this." Uh or like, "Hey, there's traffic." Or, "Hey, try this place." There are all these ways it could be useful and interesting and proactive. And I think almost every single one of them

would feel really creepy. And I think you can tell even in the interface of Ask Maps, they're trying to figure out how much can we present about your history and about your preferences and about what we know before it starts feeling less like a search engine and more like big brother.

Yeah, I I have those moments too where I'm like I find myself getting annoyed with technology. I'm like, why didn't you suggest that? Like you know what I'm doing. Why can't you just open up this app when I get to the bus stop and Yeah. have that moment of like, do I want that? Actually, that might be a little much. Um,

yeah, it's creepy. Yeah, agreed. But I feel like on balance, you've had a good experience with Ask Maps. Like, you would you would tell people to push the glowy button and give it a whirl, right? I feel like I would too.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I had it. I think really did help me in my in my mental state of being like, "Oh, I go to my same places, you know, get me outside of this." And I had like honestly the best day. And it's maybe not hard when you're using most of your workday to go eat tacos and like wander around. Um

yeah, I I went It was pouring rain. It was not a great day to be um wandering around Seattle, but I did it anyway. I went into um the conservatory at Volunteer Park um where it kind of had me it it presented the option. It was like, you know, it's going to be raining. If you want to get out of the rain, you could go into this conservatory. Um and it was beautiful and I had like such a lovely experience and I was like I I'm surrounded by plants and I'm happy.

I love that. Yeah. So for that kind of thing, it it definitely helped in in kind of multiple ways of like just getting the suggestion where it's like I'm I'm aware of Volunteer Park and I'm aware of the conservatory. It it just wouldn't cross my mind to be like, you know what, it's a super rainy day. I think I will trek across town and with a 20 minute walk between locations. Um but it ended up being really great. Um, so I'm I'm definitely gonna use it for that. I'm definitely using it for my weird um, show me all the the places in Seattle that have a view of train tracks, you know, I can bring my kid.

Um, and I Yeah, I I have a lot of plans for it, I guess. I love that. Um, all right, we should take a break. U, but will you stick around? We have another extremely Alice encoded hotline question.

Yes, I love it. It's it's it's it's even better than the last one. We're going to have a great time. We'll be right back.

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That's framer.com/verge for 30% off. framer.com/verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is vergecast theverge.com. Allison, we have another silly question about phones.

Yes, we talked recently on the show about the idea of replacing your phone with a watch and and something else. You made a very strong case that it was watch and foldable phone. Actually, a very compelling combination. Um, we have a different idea in our inbox this time. Let me play this one for you.

Hi, Stephen calling from Montreal, Quebec. I was just wondering, uh, I was listening to your conversation about using the Apple Watch as a way to get rid of your phone. What if there was just a good e in phone? Could a good e- in phone be the thing that would just slow things down enough that I'm not gonna watch uh reals or Tik Tok videos and get lost for hours because it's going to make me actually read things and I'll, you know, if I'm actually done reading something, I'll actually put it down. Anyway, I just thought that maybe that would be a good solution. Is there ever going to be a good e in phone?

Thanks. Okay, Alison, I lied. This is actually a me coded question. I see the crossover. Yeah. Yeah.

I brought you here to give you my TED talk about e- in smartphones. Oh, no. But I I do wonder this is you and I have talked about this in the past. There are people doing the like e- in on the back normal screen on the front phone. There's you've seen I think you saw at MWC the latest version of the ones with like the e- in mode.

Uh this is this is an idea that will not die and yet never seems to actually work. and and I wonder if you can just try and decode what this what what an e- in smartphone might do that would be great for people and why so far it can't pull it off.

I I sort of tried to do this myself when I um did my little Apple Watch as my phone adventure. Um I had a TCL phone. It's one of those that has the the e- inish mode.

They call it like next paper or something. Yeah, next paper. There's a little slider on the side where you like go into next paper mode and it just makes the screen like monochrome. Um, I had that uh just on Wi-Fi, no cell plan attached to it. Um, so that's how I rationalized. I was like, "Okay, I don't really have a phone with me. I have my Apple Watch and I have this weird kind of e- in phone." Um it was kind of a nice combination because in that um that e- in mode you get like crazy battery life. So I which you know is is true of an an e- in an actual e- in phone. Um the the weirdness about it um is that you do still if you're doing an Apple Watch you do still kind of need an iPhone. Um, and I found that, you know, the iPhone that was attached to Apple Watch had to be at home on um, right

on the network and then it relays all of your like Slack notifications and whatever you want to the Apple Watch. Um, so there's a little bit of chess of like you have an iPhone, but you don't bring it but in its you set it somewhere safe and then you bring your weird little ink device with the Apple Watch. Um, it did kind of work. Like I got to the coffee shop and I was like, I'm g to read an article or something that I bookmarked and it it was lovely. I put the thing away. When it's a mode on the phone, I think it gets a little like, yeah, you could just turn it off and scroll TikTok if you want. Um, so I think that's where maybe people would be interested in like give me the full pure e in device. But yeah, does this appeal to you as as the foremost uh books pulma?

I'm sitting here with my my books pulma 2 in front of me. This is not a bit. This is just here in front of me. Uh

to me the thing is a a a an experiment I encourage anyone who wants a phone like this to do is just note every time you scroll on your phone

because scrolling sucks on eBay. It just does. Like it's it's bad. It's ugly. It leaves artifacts. It's just bad. And uh even if you don't want to do social media and I think the thing where I can get the the new the Books Palma 2 Pro uh has a full-on cellular capabilities. You can use it as your phone if you want to. It's it's let down by the screens like you shouldn't buy that one. But like the theory is is getting close. And the idea that it will prevent you from using Tik Tok because Tik Tok is bad and it will prevent you from doing other things is all true. But like to our earlier conversations, the number of times you're going to need to do things like look at a restaurant website on your phone or pan through Google Maps or just any number of like little things that you do all day every day like scroll through Spotify. Those things are annoying. And it's one thing when you have it as a secondary device that is

very deliberately like this is mostly for reading and occasionally when I need to do something else I can. Like that's very powerful, right? There's a reason I like this better than a Kindle because it is mostly for reading, but it also has these other backup capabilities just in case you need them.

I find that to be very powerful, but for me, it's like n out of 10 apps that I use on my phone

suck on the books palma. Four of those apps I would love to not use and I'm happy they suck, but the other five I need all day every day and it just it's death by a thousand cuts for me. It's like e in is just not it's not fast enough. It's not sharp enough.

I just don't want to do phone things. And there are a lot of phone things that are good and useful and valuable and you just have to do them on your phone. Like pictures,

camera experience on e- in garbage and never going to get any better. So I don't know. To me it's just like this there is to me there's just this fundamental mismatch of technology. But like you bring up the next paper thing and there is something in that it's a switch you can throw idea

that feels like maybe if there is a correct answer it's that I don't think it's one screen on the front and one screen on the back but it's like there's something to the maybe my phone can have two different modes and there is something to the friction of switching them that is powerful. I don't know is anyone else other than TCL working on that? I feel like I see a next paper concept like once every 12 months and no one else seems interested in this idea at all.

I know. Yeah, I I love them for it. I the only and it's not E in it reminded me of the the monochrome E in type thing. Um Fairphone has that little mode you switch into which is more like Yeah. more like a a focus mode where you're like

I don't want access to everything. I'm doing this right now. Maybe it's my out and about and I have access to Google Maps and Spotify and what have you and then um but yeah having the the little slider the little switch where it's not it's not just in software where I can just tap and be like you know what I am actually give me access to everything.

I spent so long trying to do screen time limits for apps and was like oh it's actually really easy to just hit the button and enter my passcode like this this accomplishes nothing

right. Yeah. But yeah, that one added bit of friction might be might be something, especially if it is like a switch you have to throw. Like, have you have you used the brick at all? The the little device people use to try and disconnect.

No, I you know what, life as a phone reviewer is funny. I'm like, sure, yeah, I'd love to use my phone less. Um, kind of need to keep using the phone, but yeah, I am aware of these solutions. Um,

that's another one though that is like it's one tick extra friction and winds up being really sweet. Like I keep hearing from people all over the place where like the brick is the thing that worked for me

because now if I want to use Tik Tok I have to walk upstairs and unbrick my phone. And it's it's there and I can do it, but just the fact that I have to stand up and go unbrick my phone makes me not use TikTok. And it is it's it's even I think maybe a switch on your phone is

not quite that much friction, but even that might be enough. I have to I have to reach over and flip a thing that says I want to waste time now.

Yes. And maybe maybe if we can figure out how to do that, that's more useful than trying to like totally ruin the user experience in the name of using your phone less.

Yeah, there's a combination there. Someone's someone's just got to figure it out.

Yeah. That said, if you make an e- in phone, I tell me about it because I will try it 100%. I will throw my life into your eing phone and it and then it won't it won't be any good and I'll send it back and go back to my iPhone. This is what we do.

Ruining your life with phones. This is what we do. Are you What are you testing right now? Any weird phones in in Alison's world these days?

Um, you want to know what was the weirdest little adventure? I used the iPhone Air for a little bit. Um, and I think I like it. I know. I think it's a modular phone. It's a modular phone and it's good for like two people. There's two people who should buy it,

which is you and uh like Apple executives. Yeah. Yeah. People work at Apple. And if you're a phone reviewer, who carries two phones?

Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, true. As a second phone, hell yeah. You know what I mean? Like, if you're going to if you're going to spend all that money on a second phone,

A, what is wrong with you? And B, you are my people. Like, welcome to the first guest. Yeah, go for it.

All right, Allison, thank you as always for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you.

All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Kate and Allison for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feedback, if you've had great or terrible experiences with either cookie banners or with Ask Maps, I want to hear all about them. 86611 is the hotline. Vergecastverge.com is the email address. Send everything. If you found a really bad cookie banner, take a screenshot and send it to me. I don't know what we're going to do with it, but I want to I want to name and shame the worst cookie banners, and I need your help. Also, one bit of housekeeping before we get out of here. So, in 2 weeks, on April 21st, on Tuesday, we're going to do a whole episode about The Verge. We do this periodically, but we get lots of questions about how the Verge works and about how our business is going and about how we think about the future of media and about why Nei is

the way that he is. So, every once in a while, we try to just do an episode and answer as many of your questions as possible. And we're going to do that in 2 weeks. So, if you have questions, again, 866 Verge11 is the hotline. Vergecasterge.com is the email address. Send them all in. We're going to answer as many of them as we can all in one episode. It's going to be a really fun one. Until then, the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefir, and Travis Larchuk. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, Open AI stuff going on. There's some wild stuff happening in politics and the world and the price of everything. We're going to talk about all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast"?

David Pierce (Host), Kate Clonic (Guest), Allison Johnson (Guest).

What is discussed in "Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast"?

In order: 0:00 Vergecast, Kate Clonic, The Verge, Ask Maps; 20:00 California; 30:00 Google Maps, Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Gemini; 40:00 Google Maps, Gemini, Ask Maps, Ask Maps; 50:00 Google Maps, Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Gemini; 1:00:00 Ask Maps, Ask Maps, Volunteer Park, Vergecast; 1:10:00 Google Maps, The Brick, Spotify, The Verge.

What is mentioned in this The Verge episode?

42 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Vergecast, The Verge, Google Maps, Ask Maps, Terry Pierce, Ask Maps. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Would you let Gemini tell you where to go? | The Vergecast"?

The episode runs 1 h 17 min; the transcript is about 15,130 words in 189 timestamped sections.

More from The Verge

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated April 7, 2026.