Whether you like it or not, your smartphone knows where you are and can probably guess what you’re doing at all times. You wouldn’t necessarily know it, though, because all of the data lives in the background, accessible to apps that might need it but out of your reach. A new app called Saga that’s launching on Tuesday aims to change that by serving up that information on a platter. Using you phone’s GPS, WiFi and accelerometer, Saga tracks you where you are, tells you what you’re doing and suggests things that you might want to do next. Of course, you can share everything with your friends. It’s only creepy if you over think it.Saga works a little bit like Siri on steroids. You open the app to a “Now” screen that automatically shows you where you are and what’s around you. It also pipes in real time info like sports scores and weather data that helps power its recommendation engine. Based on where you’ve been that day and what you’ve been doing, Saga will suggest future destinations for you. If it’s a sunny day on the weekend, for instance, Saga might tell you to go to a park. At lunchtime, it will suggest some nearby restaurants and by happy hour some nearby bars. All this happens without your having to check in or really do anything. Saga just knows.“We call it an intelligent companion,” Andy Hickl, CEO and co-founder of parent company A.R.O., told VentureBeat. “We've built an app that knows where you are, what you're doing, and tries … to hook you up with information, or recommendations, or notifications that might help you out in your current context.”Hickl also describes Saga as “Mint for your life,” a utility that’s tracking how you spend your time and helping you optimize your activities. In this sense, the app is less about broadcasting your each and every move to your social network then it is about making use of your phone’s bottomless pit of personal data. There’s also a gaming element to it that awards you “Experience Points” for being out and about, a metric that could ostensibly be used to power special offers or promotions related to your activities. And of course, all of this hyper specific information would be terrific for ad targeting, though the company says its committed to not selling personal data.The makers of Saga aren’t unaware of the potential privacy concerns of an app that tracks users 24/7. There’s a giant on/off switch on the app’s home screen that toggles location tracking, and users can wipe their data from Saga’s servers any time they want. Inevitably, though, Saga’s founders hope they can convince people of the merits of self-stalking. After all, if your phone is already collecting this information, why shouldn’t you be able to use it?“We picked the name Saga not by accident,” says Hickl. “Ultimately, what we want to be able to do is tell your personal story that takes in evidence from all these different sources and makes it meaningful to you in a way that's not meaningful now.”
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