Funny, if Apple trawled through your email, calendar and search history to pull a stunt like this people would be up in arms.
Guess whether a walled garden is a bad thing depends on your particular brand of fanboyishness.
Personally speaking, the idea of Google displaying things based on my email history, diary and a knowledge of my location makes me shudder, "You're near that motel where you had that quickie last month, want to make a reservation?".
People are "up in arms" about Google's email reading _constantly_. Microsoft is producing brand new ads about it as we type. Maybe it's just hard to care after this long? Google has been traipsing through my email for a decade now and all that's ever come of it has been my personal convenience.
Of course it would, because they'd be trawling through data I haven't given them. People have given Google their email, calendar and search history by using their services. We already know they have all of our data. Is it a little scary? Sure. But you can remedy that by choosing not to give all your data to one company. You just forgo, what could be, cool features like Now by doing so.
Funny, if Apple trawled through your email, calendar and search history to pull a stunt like this people would be up in arms.
Would they? Is there any precedent here of Apple scraping user info? The usual complaints against Apple (mine included) is that their systems are far too locked down and closed to competition- not that they do funny stuff with my data.
The problem here is the long-term tendency is to turn opt-in into "if you don't opt in you don't get any of our services".
Kinda like HIPPA medical privacy rights in the USA: when you go to a doctor, they'll hand you a paper for you to sign acknowledging you understand your privacy rights...then they hand you another paper for you to sign away those rights; if you don't sign both, you don't get any medical service. Imagine a not-distant future where if you don't opt-in to questionable services from Google, Apple & Microsoft, you're flatly denied use of any of their products - digitally ostracizing yourself from most of society.
Like not getting invited to parties and gatherings if you don't use facebook or not being approached for jobs if you don't use linkedin? We're already there.
Also they didn't collect the information or share it with third parties and well it was a bug. I don't agree with the OP but I think it's unfair to contrast what Apple did with anything that also wasn't a bug. It would sort of be like comparing what Apple did with security vulnerabilities in Android; the user isn't informed, notified and permission isn't asked for on the other hand Google and Apple weren't/aren't doing so purposefully.
Unless something has changed since I first set up google now on my phone, anything that requires trawling through your inbox is entirely opt-in (that is, another layer of opt-in beyond installing the app and enabling google now)
Guess whether a walled garden is a bad thing depends on your particular brand of fanboyishness.
Personally speaking, the idea of Google displaying things based on my email history, diary and a knowledge of my location makes me shudder, "You're near that motel where you had that quickie last month, want to make a reservation?".