Dots

This post is about Google, GDPR, Sorbonne, Dubai, training data, and everything in between.

– Nowhere Man

I just came back from Paris to visit my friend and visited my second city in France. We met at the Grande dictée du sport and it’s held in Sorbonne. So it was both a Dubai reunion and about long shot dream. This post is about the first one.

Preamble

When I was about to move to Sweden 5 years ago, I was running out of space on my Android Phone. Took a lof of pictures and videos. Mostly food. So Asian, trust me.

I believe it’s an ASUS Andromax series, or Zenphone. I don’t remember. I didn’t want to delete them, but I didn’t want to keep them on my local phone either. What were my options?

Google Drive

I moved some of them to my Google Drive account. But some of them were just photos of my food in some of the restaurants/warung that I visited. For a context, food is cheap in Indonesia. In general, everything is cheaper in Indonesia compare to Sweden. So, I have a lot of food pictures in my phone.

Google Maps

Then I realized one thing, Google Maps has the user-generated content part. That is one can upload photos and videos and optionaly write reviews in the platform. Besides, it also gamifies the process with points and badges. So I uploaded all of my photos and videos partly because of the reasons that and also to helps some of felow Google Maps users.

Whose do the data belong to? Of course, Google. It’s in their terms.

Moving to Stockholm

When I moved to Stockholm, all of sudden I became top 1% contributor on Google Maps, Stockholm chapter. That’s why moving abroad is key to an advancement. Because you’ll enter new variabels: new culture, new way of doing things, hence new calculation on how life will treat you. It catapults my poiints and badges to a new playikng field. A field that is not really keen to sharing things online. I’m looking at you GDPR.

Unexpected Perks

All of sudden, on a fine workday in the office I got an email from someone who works at the Dubai tourism:

I immediately asked my colleague that is in front of me. Does it sound legit? It does. Then I replied the email. It does.

We are three people from Stockholm and in total more thatn 20 people from around the world.

Some of the places that we visited: the Frame, Burj Khalifa, Plam Jumeirah, Hadi al Wahid, among other places.

What’s the point?

I was in the right time and the right place. Paris is always a good idea.