How does Evernote know where I am?
Yesterday, while I was at WordCamp Seattle (which was a blast by the way!), I wanted to quickly jot down some notes. I opened up Evernote on my iPhone, and clicked on new note, and the title of the note auto-completed to “Note from WordCamp Seattle”.
Some clues as to how this may have happened (I don’t know the actual answer):
- I did have WordCamp Seattle in my calendar for that day
- I checked in on Foursquare, but tagged my checkin as #wcsea not the words “WordCamp Seattle”
- Other people there likely were also using Evernote and maybe they called their notes “WordCamp Seattle”
In any case, the app never prompted me to access any of my data from an external application, so I’m very curious how they were able to do this. I don’t really mind, because it was convenient to have that auto-filled and it amazed me at first; but at the same time, I really wonder how it knew, and how much of my data Evernote can access. Does anyone know how Evernote knew where I was?
Joey Kudish 
My guess would be a foursquare type system, where you might have given it permission once to access your location whenever. It then hops online and checks for any event when checked in to venues, much like foursquare asks what movie you’re seeing when you check in to a movie theatre.
Found my definite answer today when I created a new note. It pulled the event from my iPhone’s calendar. This was the only place that this particular event existed on my phone or anywhere else. Still kinda creepy and surprised that Apple doesn’t force Apps to ask permission before doing this (just like it does with location data)
I confirm that the same stuff Joey experienced one year ago happens on an Android 4.3 today. Evernote pulls the destination of your Calendar and wack it into the title of the new note hence my parents name were autofilled today.