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- [00:02]
Nilay Patel
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 Pearce and I got a new phone. I know I told you I was done with this wild phone experiment that I've been on, and that's true, but that doesn't mean that I don't get needlessly excited about some wacky new idea about how phones are supposed to work, especially if they're supposed to save me from using my phone too much. The new one I have is called the Sidephone, and the idea is basically it's like a minimalist Android phone, but it has attachments for the bottom half. So essentially imagine a BlackBerry but you can lift off the keyboard and it just has sort of individually replacement parts. So you can have one that looks like an actual kind of full keyboard, but then you can also put on just number keys if all you want to use it for is to make calls. But the one I think is most fun is it has an ipod style click wheel that you can just stick into place and suddenly you have a thing that looks like an ipod. I find this so charming and I love the idea of a phone that can be lots of things, but tries very hard to only be one of them at a time. And you have to be like, I am using my phone as a camera now, so I'm going to attach the thing and use it as a camera and it's less useful as everything else. And then you're like, well, I'm going to use it as a music player now. And it's not everything to everyone at all times. Even though it can do lots of things, I think it's very cool. I need to test this phone a bunch more. I have a bunch of questions about how this hardware is going to hold up over time, frankly, but also whether this idea of interchangeable keyboards can make a phone feel minimalist and useful all at the same time. But I'm pretty excited about it. But today's show is not about smartphones. Mostly today's show is about two things. First, Kate Clonik, 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 webpage 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. Vergecastheverge.com is the email of about smartphones. We're going to talk a little bit about smartphones. It's going to be great. All that is coming up in just a sec. But first 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 the click wheel. This is the vergecast. We'll be right back.
- [02:34]
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- [03:08]
Allison Johnson
Oh, hey, sorry, love to chat, but I'm busy shopping all the rollbacks and more at Walmart.
- [03:15]
Kate Clonik
Grab a what?
- [03:16]
Nilay Patel
Cancel that.
- [03:16]
Kate Clonik
I gotta grab these big savings on the Walmart app online and in store, like right now.
- [03:22]
Allison Johnson
See who.
- [03:23]
Interjection/Transition Voice
Ugh.
- [03:24]
Kate Clonik
Nope. Unavail. The only thing I want to see are the prices just lowered on tech home and all my must haves. Wait, you want to shop Walmart with me? Alrighty.
- [03:35]
Allison Johnson
I think I can fit you in
- [03:37]
Nilay Patel
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- [03:40]
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- [03:43]
Nilay Patel
Grab your docs, your permits, your moves,
- [03:46]
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- [03:49]
Nilay Patel
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- [03:51]
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- [03:54]
Nilay Patel
Draft design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat. All right, we're back. Let's talk cookies. So cookie banners are one of those sort of low grade annoyances of being online that I think everybody has just learned to deal with, right? You go to a website, it pops up. You can click agree or you can click more info or you can click I don't know, don't track or whatever. Sometimes if you don't accept the cookies, it just kicks you out of whatever you were trying to do. So everybody just clicks Agree. You accept the cookies, you get the cookies, you move on with your life. This is not great product, but it's also fine, right? I think if you polled most people about what sucks about being online, I'm not sure cookie banners would be the number one thing on the list, which is why I thought it was so surprising that Kate Clonik, who is a professor at St. John's and a writer and an author and someone who has been tracking legal and political technology for a very long time, wrote a very strong and powerfully worded piece recently about why we need to kill cookie banners. Not rethink them, not make them smaller, not make them more useful, get rid of them entirely. I asked Kate to come on the show both to explain how she arrived at this thesis and also how cookie banners arrived at this place. It. 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, and that is what she did. We had a lot of fun. I think you're gonna enjoy it, too. Let's get into it. Kate Clonik, welcome to the Verse cast.
- [05:37]
Kate Clonik
Thanks for having me.
- [05:38]
Nilay Patel
I brought you here to talk about cookies, the scourge of the Internet. And I'm curious why, for you, this became an issue worth doing sort of real research and writing on, why it rose past the level of, like, annoying thing I click on on the Internet to let me study, why this thing is such a problem.
- [05:58]
Kate Clonik
So I was living in Europe. I was on a Fulbright in Paris to research the Digital Services Act. And I was there. And I thought 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 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, the European Commission decided to reevaluate the, the law, the underlying regulations that had kind of been part of the genesis of, of how, 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.
- [07:38]
Nilay Patel
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 U.S. yeah.
- [07:59]
Kate Clonik
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 when there was a certain merger that now it's kind of, you know, passe. But there was all of a sudden people realized that the money of the Internet was going to be ads. And so there were a bunch of mergers in like the early 2000s with DoubleClick and like Google and like a bunch of acquisitions. And so those acquisitions 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. And as I say in the article, the cookie is a neutral technology. It's actually pretty necessary for how the Internet works. It creates kind of a like, it means that you're not in like this stateless space and that you're kind of moving forward or backwards from different pages and how you do a search. It basically I kind of compare it to breadcrumbs is kind of like the best way to put it. It kind of like leaves this trail that you can follow either way and makes it much more usable, makes it usable at all for the user. So there's like this necessary part of cookies, but the second that you could realize that you could kind of track what a user was doing online that is incredibly immensely powerful and valuable to ad tracking technology. And then we developed all of these ways that they were tracking us across the Internet. And people were worried, I think like with good reason. I, people at the time did not understand fully kind of what this was revealing about their personally identifiable information. They didn't realize what if it was revealing anything at all. They didn't want to be commoditized. And this is something that Europe, we tried to pass stuff in the US it didn't. Spoiler alert. It did not happen. And 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 than the US which made it more plausible that they could pass something like this and that it could take effect in all of Europe. And so that's what they did in the E Privacy 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 pop up, anything about notice. It says that you have to have the right to refuse such processing. And so this slowly kind of gets, and this is kind of a story a little bit about regulatory capture and how industry, how like when you regulate something and you don't know what it means, what ends up happening is like industry and lobbyists and like lawyers end up like basically deciding what it means and all kind of coming around some type of level of compliance that they are assured will make it so they don't get fined tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. And then that becomes the interpretation of the law. So there's like this kind of black and white concept people have of a lot of law that like it is what it is. But 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, 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 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 there, 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 and this being their solution to it as, you know, potentially, if you want to put blame on people, which I don't really think is worth doing. The, you know, the, the European laws are fair. That's the 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 har.
- [12:52]
Nilay Patel
Harm.
- [12:53]
Kate Clonik
We would be better off without them than this world with them. And so, like, like, they're. It's not even. They were just like, completely neutral and they did nothing, then fine, but that they're not. And so that's actually kind of the, the big takeaway.
- [13:08]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I want to, I want to interrogate the we'd be better off without them argument a little bit because I think, 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 letter of the law, sort of literally and figuratively and get away with it. And we have done our privacy work. Everything is fine. No one's going to sue us, we're not going to get fined by the eu and it has sort of calcified into this crappy experience that accomplishes nothing, but it works. And that the thing we should do is tear it down in such a way that what we actually do is have new conversations about new ways to do this. Right. We need different kinds of regulations, we need different product answers to how we talk about privacy and manage these people. We need whole new approaches to privacy. And I think I agree with all of that in principle. But it does seem to me that what you, 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. 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.
- [14:28]
Kate Clonik
Yeah.
- [14:29]
Nilay Patel
Do you feel that way?
- [14:30]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, I absolutely do. I think that the. As we kind of, as you just spelled out for me, the compliance regime that tech companies and regulators have reached this detente 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 this with. We've been doing this for 25 years. We've answered, we've solved this problem.
- [15:05]
Nilay Patel
And importantly, you clicked the button, right?
- [15:07]
Kate Clonik
And you clicked the button. Don't you feel like you have agency and, you know, you have not only agency, you have transparency. And so there is this panacea that gets created from the regulatory side, and then that's also supported by the compliance regime that the tech companies have reached. They've invested the money, they've invested the research, and they're 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. They just do it now. And they know that that will keep them mostly from being. From being fined or. Or whatever else. And so they have no desire to reinvent the wheel either. That's a whole new lift for them, right? That's a whole new lift. It's like right now they've solved a problem that doesn't actually block them from tracking that much. First of all, that's really important because as I talk about in the paper, this technology of cookies being used as tracking is still used around the margins. I don't want to make it sound like it's completely outdated. There are still ad trackers that use this. But it 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. 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 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 technical, 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 get us some new regulation that actually did the hard work of protecting users privacy.
- [17:39]
Interjection/Transition Voice
Okay.
- [17:39]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I love the phrase manufacturer consent because it feels like all of this sits right next to the terms of service and the privacy policies and all of the other things that we click the checkboxes on when we sign up for things and no one ever reads them. And uh, you, you say this great 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. Um, 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. I'm sure you follow these as much as I do. These times when everybody, like every four years, everybody freaks out about the Instagram terms of service, even though it never changes. And most of what it's asking you for is actually perfectly plausible. Like we need to be able to store one image on multiple servers, and so we need permission to copy your image. And everybody freaks out about what that means because nobody understands these things because they don't have to. Because 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 the actual responsibility to consent with full knowledge and actually give them that full knowledge? Like, part of me just wonders, I can't even imagine what the better version of this looks like. And I wonder what you think it might look like.
- [19:19]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, so first of all, I have to like credit the fact that this is a response to a really great article in the same, in the same Journal by Robin Bradley Carr and Xu Wei, which is the contractual death and rebirth of privacy. And there is, I mean it's 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 legalese and these unknowable terms of service and these unreadable privacy notices is not new and not something and something that like people have bemoaned for a long time, the so called click wrap kind of contracts that have proliferated. And I end kind of the piece in part with like this idea that my friend and colleague Dave Hoffman has written about at Penn, who, who kind of calls for fewer forms, like just get rid of, like make, make it, 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 and even with kind of moments of agency because of how power works in these systems. And I mean that's a high level theoretical kind of framing of this. But to answer your question, like what could possibly be better? There are like a few kind of things that I float 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 non pii 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, like actually concretely show that, that are not based on a leak of personally identifiable information. Like that's like being, you know, that, you know, in Europe there are dignity harms and other types of things. But in the US like there's not. It would be much harder to kind of show that there are actually harms in this, in this capacity. And so I think that we just need to have Some really hard conversations about that 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 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 kooky banners. Like, I don't know but I mean, but ended up being like 5 cent, a 5 cent check to you. Like, you know that like it costs more to print and mail than probably than your data is worth. But like, but my point is, is like we could have some conversations about this. And I think the conversation has just gotten so much more sophisticated in 25 years, in 15 years, in the last five years since the tech lash kind of started and kind and. And shifted during COVID when we all kind of went online, there has just been a huge change in how we're doing this. And so I don't have perfect solutions. I just think that, I just think that there's. There are a few out there that I think would be slightly better than this. And even those are worth discussing, I think, in, in light of how terribly this is going.
- [23:30]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, yeah. I mean one thing I was thinking about is the Apple tracking pop up that when it, when an app wants to collect that data about you, it puts up this very simple thing and you can either say allow or you can say Ask app not to track. And that at least as far as I can tell, has had a very different outcome than the cookie banners, which is that a lot, maybe most people click ask app not to track because it is, it makes very clear the thing that's happening. And part of me wonders if there's a version of cookie banners that should just look more like that. You sort of trace the evolution of cookie banners in a way that I find really interesting from relatively straightforward, simple things telling you what's going on and giving you opt out to now it's like, you know, there's a bunch of buttons and a ton of legalese and the only thing that makes any plausible sense to do is just hit agree so the thing will close. And part of me wonders like if, 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 like 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 it, is there something there that could have worked if we had not let these banners become the bizarre things that they've turned into?
- [24:52]
Kate Clonik
Yeah. So one thing that I think is fascinating is just like, and I talk about this term and I'll just kind of refresh it for your listeners. I talk about the Brussels effect, which is the so called kind of the, the effect of what gets legislated or regulated by Brussels, which is the capital of the European Union, becomes de facto policy for these transnational companies because it is easier comply, even if so it has extraterritorial effect. Even so, like me sitting in New York City is impacted by European law, even though I'm technically not. It's not, you know, it's not enforceable against me simply because for Google or Apple or Facebook to have different types of policy between Dublin and, and the US Is too expensive. And so it's easier to just make a one size fits all solution. We had a similar thing with like, I don't know, you've maybe heard of the Texas California schoolbook effect, where like those two giant markets determine the, like the, you know, the available textbooks for school children for most of the country. Right. Or the European, 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.
- [26:14]
Nilay Patel
Because making a car for California and making a car for the other 49 states just doesn't make any sense.
- [26:18]
Kate Clonik
Makes no sense. Right, exactly. So this is like this extraterritorial effect that's well, kind of established, this play between markets and regulation. What's kind of interesting and I think is kind of funny is that in Europe they have their own thing called the California effect. And so you said something just now that I think is kind of interesting. You're like, well, should Brussels, should Europe get to like dictate what, 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 U.S. and the Californians 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 within 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 is no say that Europe has enough. 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 there is, but it's definitely like, it is definitely like 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 like comparatively small but still like next largest richest market market share to push back on kind of this, this dominance from tech companies. So I just kind of wanted to complicate that narrative a little of like, well why should we listen to the eu? And I'm like, well they'd say the same about us. Like why are they, why should we be listening? 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 to that question of Apple deciding that they were not going to play ball with other, they were going to make this change in their, in their ad trackers. There is also another part of that that is 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, of that we have too many large players in the, and the, and the ad space and just not enough diversity and who kind of controls the ad sale market. And so the fact that Apple could unilaterally decide to just completely disrupt this by just like a whim of policy change more so than, or in the same way to the same effect, maybe to greater effect than cookie banners did is I think a great. I would if I have a part two maybe like if I make this like if this is like the Empire Strikes Back version of this, of this article, maybe I'll write it about Apple's, Apple's decision to kind of change its ad tracking system. Because yeah, it's a great point. I think that all of this is just kind of let's play all of these powers and forces against each other, but let's not forget who they should be operating for ideally, which is the end user and the citizen. And I think that that just gets forgotten all the time. And so 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. You know, this doesn't serve us at all. Us being like the citizens and the people who are using this technology.
- [30:03]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I agree. So you mentioned 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.
- [30:15]
Kate Clonik
They said, they answered simplifying their, their policy around data protection.
- [30:19]
Nilay Patel
Do you think there's a real chance of actual honest to God change here?
- [30:23]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, I do. The main thing is that, is that I have heard that this is, that this is something that is on the table, that they are really, really thinking about this because it is unclear especially with agentic AI with kind of 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 non viable and 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 commonsensical 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 in 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 is some appetite for this 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 at this current juncture when it just feels like there isn't a lot of 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.
- [31:56]
Allison Johnson
Yeah.
- [31:56]
Kate Clonik
And so I kind of, I'm an optimistic person. I also never by the way ever am like a person who says we should burn it all down. So this is like 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, no, no, 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'd just be Better with nothing. And so that's all you have to do.
- [32:21]
Nilay Patel
And that, in fact, maybe we can't come up with a new solution until we burn this one down.
- [32:26]
Kate Clonik
Exactly. Exactly.
- [32:27]
Nilay Patel
My favorite thing about this is. I think it is, like, 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.
- [32:46]
Allison Johnson
I've never. I don't think you exist.
- [32:48]
Kate Clonik
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. Cause I'm, you know, I'm me. But there is, like. And it takes a long time to write academic papers, but the. The main thing is that people mostly say that 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, and you're 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 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. But it's a little more effort, and by the time you remember to do it, like, you're on to other things. And so you just keep walking across the living room. It's like, well, you just don't have to have bruised shins, my dude. You just don't have to do it. Like, your life could. You know, your life could be as simple as a light switch. And so I don't know. That's kind of what I feel. How I feel about this kind of this problem.
- [34:20]
Nilay Patel
And, yeah, you don't have to have bruised shins. It's 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.
- [34:30]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, thank you so much.
- [34:32]
Nilay Patel
All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about ask maps and AI for the real world.
- [34:37]
Interjection/Transition Voice
We'll be right back.
- [34:40]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [37:59]
Allison Johnson
All right, we're back.
- [38:00]
Nilay Patel
The Verge's senior reviewer, Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.
- [38:03]
Allison Johnson
Hello.
- [38:04]
Nilay Patel
We are back with another edition of Ruining Allison's Life with Phones. Yeah, Very excited about this. We've started something.
- [38:10]
Allison Johnson
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.
- [38:21]
Nilay Patel
It's, I mean, it's great, but every once in a while it goes super well for you.
- [38:25]
Allison Johnson
Yeah.
- [38:25]
Nilay Patel
And that is what we're here to talk about. I'm particularly curious about Ask Maps and Gemini and Google Maps and this whole thing, because a theory I have long held is that Google Maps is actually the perfect example of the trade we make with technology all the time. And I want to talk about it, but I think it is, like, particularly true in 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. What is this feature?
- [39:09]
Allison Johnson
So it's essentially just Gemini, kind of chatbot inside of Google Maps. Yeah. You tap the little thing that says Ask Maps, you get the text box screen and it's like, where do you want to go? Do you want to plan a date night or whatever? And you just kind of freestyle and you ask about the things around you and it will go into, 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 has some of those, like, all around Gemini capabilities, but it's more grounded and like more focused in the information in Google Maps.
- [40:01]
Nilay Patel
So how does this track with how you normally use Google Maps? Because I think there are lots of different kinds of Maps users. Did this sort of track with the way you already use the app?
- [40:14]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, I think about this a lot. I'm like a recreational Google Maps user, 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.
- [40:36]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [40:43]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, Ask Maps. You know, don't go there with this. Just continue using Google Maps as you would. I use it as kind of like I want to check out, you know, the neighborhood where we're going to have dinner and see like, well, maybe there's like a cool playground we can stop at or, or 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. So. So I just poke around in Maps sometimes. Sometimes I have no agenda. I'm just like, I don't know what's going to 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.
- [41:27]
Nilay Patel
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 Maps search is probably the phrase breakfast sandwich. Because wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I am permanently on the lookout for like a pretty good bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. It is all I want every day in the whole world. And Google Maps has always been almost right for that, but never quite right for that. And it'll always be like, you know, reviews mention xyz, reviews mention breakfast sandwich, which is sort of helpful, but only if people are reviewing the words breakfast sandwich. And this is the sort of thing that actually, if you take AI and its ability to do this, like, summarization and sort of fuzzy search and actually pull a bunch of sources together, it can start to do things like, actually help you understand what is good on the menu at the place that you're going to and whether this thing and this thing are both good. Like, I want a place that has both a good breakfast sandwich and a pretty good cup of coffee. And that is the thing Google Maps is just structurally not set up to do. So the idea of like, like you said, we have 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, yeah. 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.
- [43:06]
Allison Johnson
Yeah. And it. It is really good for those kind of like, I'm not just looking for coffee near me. There's 1 million coffee shops around me. I'm like, I have.
- [43:15]
Nilay Patel
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, 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, nothing is able to do that so far.
- [43:33]
Allison Johnson
Yes. Yeah. For us recreational maps users, it can put together concepts or, like, extrapolate from something where I'm like, I'm looking for a coffee shop where I can bring my laptop to work for the afternoon. And it understands, you know, some of the criteria around that. And it'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 cozy. It's open till 4:00pm you know, it's like, doesn't close at 2. 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.
- [44:19]
Nilay Patel
I love it. So you set up an experiment where you basically decided to let Jen and I plan a lovely city day for you. Tell me about the planning process before we get into the day. What was the setup like?
- [44:31]
Allison Johnson
So I just kind of gave it the assignment and I gave it a few criteria. I was Like, I want to spend a day in the city. I want somewhere to get lunch. I'm going to be taking public transit. I want to take, like a nice little walk somewhere and find a coffee shop where I can sit with my laptop and work for a few hours. And I need to be home by
- [44:56]
Nilay Patel
4:30pm I want to have a lovely city day. And I'm also on a very tight schedule.
- [45:00]
Allison Johnson
Yes. And I have extremely specific criteria for. Would be the most intense thing to, like, tell your friend. Yeah. Google Maps, though. Yeah. Just kind of put it all together. The first suggestions it gave me were, I guess, maybe too good, because I was like, oh, I've been there, you know, Like, I know about that coffee shop. I was there a week ago.
- [45:26]
Nilay Patel
So I will say, by the way, this is one thing I've noticed about Gemini and the as Maps feature in my own use so far. I wish it was paying more attention to where I've been before.
- [45:37]
Allison Johnson
Yeah.
- [45:37]
Nilay Patel
Because I've had. I've had the same experience a couple of times now where I'm like, oh, where should we go? Like, what's a good. I want tacos. Like, surprise me. Where should we go get tacos? And pretty consistently it has offered me places I've already been for tacos, which on the one hand is fine, but I've had to really push it to be like, show me things, you know, for sure I don't know anything about. And then there are a couple on the flip side where it's like, I was like, 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, yeah. Anyone who is wondering what Google Maps knows about you, go find your location history on Google Maps. The answer is everything.
- [46:17]
Allison Johnson
It's frightening. Yeah.
- [46:19]
Nilay Patel
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 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. 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.
- [46:56]
Allison Johnson
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.
- [47:17]
Nilay Patel
You're doing your best, and I love that.
- [47:19]
Allison Johnson
I recognize you. 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.
- [47:40]
Nilay Patel
I'm actually okay with that being kind of the criteria.
- [47:43]
Kate Clonik
Right.
- [47:43]
Allison Johnson
Yeah. So it. It charted me a little route, you know, and it gives you little shortcuts to access the transit directions along the way. It gives you a map so you can see generally, like, where what your route is going to look like.
- [48:00]
Nilay Patel
So it'll spit out, like, a full itinera. I'm just realizing I have not done this ambitious a search with it yet. Oh, cool.
- [48:06]
Kate Clonik
Okay.
- [48:07]
Allison Johnson
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.
- [48:18]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [48:25]
Allison Johnson
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.
- [48:32]
Nilay Patel
What are those? Yeah, I've never heard of.
- [48:34]
Allison Johnson
Yeah. Even when it can, I'm like, you have access to my whole life. Come on.
- [48:38]
Interjection/Transition Voice
Yeah.
- [48:38]
Nilay Patel
Seriously?
- [48:39]
Allison Johnson
Yeah. So it sent me to a taco shop up the street. Well, a little ways up in, you know, the neighborhood, to a. 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, and it had all of the, like, you know, you'll have an hour and a half here, then you'll need to head for the. The bus stop. It's a couple blocks away. And that the, you know, the 3:50 bus should get you home by 4:30. So it was pretty complete that it was considering all of my various specific weird criteria.
- [49:25]
Nilay Patel
So how much time do you feel like this process saved you? Like, I think the question of, you know, find me a coffee shop I would not have found on my. Or I haven't been to before, but people are kind of out there. You can do that, right?
- [49:37]
Allison Johnson
Like, that's a.
- [49:37]
Nilay Patel
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. 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?
- [50:11]
Allison Johnson
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 gonna be able to do this faster.
- [50:32]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [50:39]
Allison Johnson
Yeah.
- [50:39]
Nilay Patel
You and I share that personality trait.
- [50:41]
Allison Johnson
Okay. Are we sociopaths? Is that.
- [50:44]
Nilay Patel
I think so. It means you're a terrible person who is not considerate of other people's time. I think it's essentially the readout.
- [50:49]
Allison Johnson
I've always suspected this myself. 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. 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, 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 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 sort of helped me just to like fill in the blank canvas. That can feel overwhelming, I think.
- [52:03]
Nilay Patel
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. 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 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. 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?
- [53:08]
Allison Johnson
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 where I, I see myself using it as more of like, 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. So. And it's awesome. It actually takes you over Lake Washington. It's the first light rail system to go over a floating bridge. Who knew that was like, this is rad. Where can we go along this. This new part of the line? And it put together some suggestions. Like, you know, there's a. There's a playground in this neighborhood, and there's actually like, a viewing platform so you can see the trains go by. 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 gonna. Like, he loves vehicles. Like, this was a very easy sell.
- [54:25]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Sure.
- [54:25]
Allison Johnson
I didn't do the whole, like, we're gonna 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. But it was very successful. And I don't think I would have found exactly the same places. Just kind of like scrolling around on Google Maps the way I want to.
- [54:49]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I find with a lot of this stuff, 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 searched for restaurants, 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.
- [55:06]
Allison Johnson
And it's.
- [55:07]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [55:16]
Allison Johnson
Yep.
- [55:17]
Nilay Patel
Where do I go? And. And the. 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 would like something pretty good as quickly as possible, which, ironically, is the whole pitch of AI.
- [55:42]
Allison Johnson
I know, right?
- [55:44]
Nilay Patel
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. But I do wonder, and 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. 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 kind of AI in AI out piece of Ask Maps here?
- [56:42]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, I thought about this a lot because it sort of mirrors what I do. Like, reviewing phones in a way. You know, if you think about someone who reviews restaurants or, you know, is sort of a curator for maybe a website like Eater, which I read all the time, not a plug for our Vox Media friends.
- [57:07]
Nilay Patel
Shout out to Eater.
- [57:08]
Allison Johnson
Shout out to Eater. I genuinely just am always on Seattle Eater. There's sort of that aspect where it's like, 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 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 Reddit community or a blog that is, like, focused on that specific thing. So I kind of got to a place 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. 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 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. 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 that. You know, an eater is not going to be able to answer. They don't have 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
- [59:18]
Nilay Patel
they just need a big parking lot.
- [59:20]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parking lot with some weird cars. We love it. But.
- [59:24]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [59:32]
Kate Clonik
Yes, exactly.
- [59:33]
Nilay Patel
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 you're exactly right. Falling back to this, we are just going to solve this very simple day to day problem for you without trying to sort of be discovery based 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 maybe this is just my own moral quandary 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 I think I struggle with this all the time with Google Maps just in general. Like 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.
- [61:08]
Allison Johnson
Yeah.
- [61:09]
Nilay Patel
And then yet on the other side, 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, hitting that every time because I'm like, this is. And this. This goes back to what I'm saying about the trade earlier. It's like, this is 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 navigate 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 a quandary for you in the same way that it is for me, or am I just way too deep in my own head about this?
- [62:08]
Allison Johnson
No, I. I definitely feel it. Especially when you bring AI into the equation. It's like, I have decades of history on Google Maps. It probably knows every address I've lived at in the past 20 years or whatever.
- [62:24]
Nilay Patel
Again, go to your location information. It will terrify you.
- [62:27]
Allison Johnson
So horrifying. 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.
- [62:40]
Nilay Patel
Like, people super want to be reminded of all of this information that we have about them.
- [62:44]
Allison Johnson
Take a look. Trip down memory lane. Don't love that. Yeah. There is a weird thing with AI, especially when it comes to, like, my family, where I'm 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, whoa.
- [63:26]
Nilay Patel
Hold up.
- [63:27]
Allison Johnson
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. Maybe it is just a we like that veil of, like, you know, that the data's there, but you're not, like, presenting it, like, putting it in my face quite so acutely.
- [63:49]
Nilay Patel
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 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 probably going there again, right? You want to navigate? Let's do this. 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 seeing 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.
- [64:44]
Allison Johnson
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. Yeah, it's creepy.
- [65:06]
Interjection/Transition Voice
Yeah, agreed.
- [65:07]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [65:16]
Allison Johnson
Oh, yeah, Yeah. I had, 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. Yeah, I. I went. It was pouring rain. It was not a great day to be wandering around Seattle, but I did it anyway. I went into the conservatory at Volunteer park, where it kind of had me. 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 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.
- [66:09]
Nilay Patel
I love that.
- [66:09]
Allison Johnson
Yeah. So for that kind of thing, 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 in with a 20 minute walk between locations. But it ended up being really great. So I'm, I'm definitely gonna use it for that. I'm definitely using it for my weird. Show me all the, the places in Seattle that have a view of train tracks. You know, I can bring my kid and I, Yeah, I, I have a lot of plans for it, I guess.
- [66:59]
Nilay Patel
I love that. All right, we should take a break, but will you stick around? We have another extremely Alice encoded hotline question.
- [67:06]
Allison Johnson
Yes.
- [67:06]
Kate Clonik
I love it.
- [67:07]
Nilay Patel
It's, it's, it's, it's even better than the last one. We're gonna have a great time. We'll be right, right back.
- [67:13]
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- [69:14]
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- [69:58]
Nilay Patel
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 to the verge.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 something else. You made a very strong case that it was watch and foldable phone. Actually a very compelling combination. We have a different idea in our inbox this time. Let me play this one for you.
- [70:27]
Interjection/Transition Voice
Hi Stephen calling from Montreal, Quebec. I was just wondering, 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 Ink phone? Could a good E Ink phone be the thing that would just slow things down enough that I'm not gonna watch reels or TikTok videos and get lost for hours because it's gonna 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 gonna be a Good. E Ink phone. Thanks.
- [71:06]
Nilay Patel
Okay, Allison, I lied. This is actually a me coded question.
- [71:09]
Allison Johnson
I see the crossover. Yeah. Yeah.
- [71:11]
Nilay Patel
I brought you here to give you my TED talk about E Ink smartphones.
- [71:14]
Allison Johnson
Oh, no.
- [71:16]
Nilay Patel
But I do wonder. This is. You and I have talked about this in the past. There are people doing the, like, E Ink 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 Ink mode. This is an idea that will not die and yet never seems to actually work. And I wonder if you can just try and decode what an E Ink smartphone might do. That would be great for people and why so far, it can't pull it off.
- [71:48]
Allison Johnson
I sort of tried to do this myself when I did my little Apple Watches, my phone adventure. I had a TCL phone. It's one of those that has the. The E Ink ish mode.
- [72:01]
Nilay Patel
They call it, like, Next Paper or something.
- [72:03]
Allison Johnson
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. I had that just on wifi, no cell plan attached to it. 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. This weird kind of E Ink phone. It was kind of a nice combination because in that. That E Ink mode, you get, like, crazy battery life. So I. Which, you know, is as true of an E Ink, an actual E Ink phone. The. The weirdness about it is that you do still. If you're doing an Apple Watch, you do still kind of need an iPhone. And I found that, you know, the iPhone that was attached to Apple Watch had to be at home on. On the network. And then it relays all of your, like, Slack notifications and whatever you want to the Apple Watch. So there's a little bit of chess of like, you have an iPhone, but you don't bring it. But in it's. You set it somewhere safe and then you bring your weird little E Ink device. With the Apple Watch, it did kind of work. Like, I got to the coffee shop and I was like, I'm going to read an article or something that I bookmarked, and 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. So I think that's where maybe people would Be interested in like give me the full pure E Ink device. But yeah. Does this appeal to you as the foremost books Palma.
- [73:52]
Nilay Patel
I'm sitting here with my books Palma too in front of me. This is not a bit. This is just here in front of me. To me the thing is 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 E. It just does. It's bad, it's ugly, it leaves artifacts. It's just bad. And even if you don't want to do social media and I think the thing where I can get the new the Boox Palma 2 Pro has a full on cellular capabilities. You can use it as your phone if you want to. It's let down by the screens like you shouldn't buy that one. But the theory is getting close and the idea that it will prevent you from using TikTok because TikTok 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. Yeah, I find that to be very powerful. But for me it's like 9 out of 10 apps that I use on my phone suck on the Boox 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 Ink 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 Ink garbage. Never gonna 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.
- [76:29]
Allison Johnson
I know, yeah, I, I love them for it. I the only. And it's not E Ink, but it reminded me of the, the monochrome E Ink type thing. Fairphone has that little mode you switch into which is more like, yeah, more like 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. But yeah, having 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.
- [77:12]
Nilay Patel
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, yeah, this, this accomplishes nothing.
- [77:21]
Allison Johnson
Right?
- [77:22]
Kate Clonik
Yeah.
- [77:23]
Nilay Patel
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?
- [77:34]
Allison Johnson
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. Kind of need to keep using the phone. But yeah, I am aware of these solutions.
- [77:49]
Nilay Patel
That's another one, though. That is like, it's one tick extra friction and winds up being released. Like, I keep hearing from people all over the place who are like, the brick is the thing that worked for me because now if I want to use TikTok, I have to walk upstairs and unbrick my phone. And 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 an enough. Yeah, I have to. I have to reach over and flip a thing that says, I want to waste time now.
- [78:23]
Allison Johnson
Yes.
- [78:24]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [78:33]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, there's a combination there. Someone's. Someone's just gotta figure it out.
- [78:38]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. That said, if you make an E ink phone, I. Tell me about it, because I will try it 100%. I will throw my life into your E Ink phone, 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.
- [78:52]
Allison Johnson
Ruining your life with phones.
- [78:53]
Nilay Patel
This is what we do. Are you. What are you testing right now? Any weird phones in Alison's world these days?
- [78:58]
Allison Johnson
You want to know? It was the weirdest little adventure. I used the iPhone air for a little bit, and I think I like it. 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,
- [79:16]
Nilay Patel
which is you and, like, Apple executives.
- [79:19]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, yeah. People work at Apple. And if you're a phone reviewer who carries two phones.
- [79:25]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, true as a second phone. Hell yeah.
- [79:28]
Kate Clonik
Right?
- [79:29]
Nilay Patel
You know what I mean? Like, if you're gonna. If you're gonna spend all that money on a second phone. Yeah. A, what is wrong with you? And B, you are my people. Like, welcome to the first cast.
- [79:37]
Allison Johnson
Yeah, go for it.
- [79:39]
Nilay Patel
All right, Allison, thank you as always, for being here. Appreciate it. It.
- [79:41]
Allison Johnson
Thank you.
- [79:42]
Nilay Patel
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 asked maps, I want to Hear all about them. 866-Verge11 is the hotline. Vergecasthe verge.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 gonna do with it, but I wanna. I wanna name and shame the worst cookie banners, and I need your help. Also, one bit of housekeeping before we get outta here. So in two weeks, on April 21, on Tuesday, we're gonna 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 Nilai 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 gonna do that in two weeks. So if you have questions again, 866-verge-11 is the hotline. Vergecastheverge.com is the email address. Send them all in. We're gonna answer as many of them as we can, all in one episode. It's gonna 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 Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news OpenAI 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.