Timeline was one of those maps features that our users loved, despite it not being super discoverable in the app. A lot of users treated it as a diary and would write pages of personal notes in a textbox box next to their daily trips (for a while there was a bug where that text had no char limit). Sometimes I'd have to debug the spanner rows - it wasn't uncommon to see transcriptions of people's diet and exercise logs. One guy had poems about his wife in there.
Very impressive system that had a big budget in the mid 2010s (mostly built by zurich, iirc). They even hired a bunch of tvcs to walk around movie theaters and scan the wifi ssids, so timeline could show you what movie you saw. It had a photos integration as well that would show the pics you took that day. All sorts of plans for more delightful features like that. I think the value prop was that deeply integrating people's memories made maps a stickier product.
The investment and headcount started getting cut post-pandemic, like everything else at Google. Lots of team churn, not just on Timeline but on hulk and the semantic location service which undergirded it. When I was last there SLS was literally 1 guy who either could not or would not leave. Those services became abandonware, along with all the flumes and postwrite processors responsible for cleaning up the data and enforcing heuristics. Exactly 0 people on the web UI - some of the directories were literally un-reviewable (the code owners had left and no one in geo had MPA-approval). That decay led to a noticeable decline in the accuracy of reported trips. Users weren't happy, angry reports started piling up about inaccurate/missing trips. It was embarassing. Timeline was moved to the back burner and the idea of being a cute time capsule for users no longer aligned with the AI maximalists.
By '22 the investment and headcount was slashed. IMO the ODLH death march was as much about throwing in the towel for Timeline as a product as it was about getting location data off of Google's servers.
I ended up losing nearly 15 years of my Google Location history during the switch to on-device, so if you're interested in doing analyses like this, be sure to back up your data on Takeout before you enable the on-device setting that nemo1618 mentioned. Once that setting is set, the data is no longer available on Takeout, and if the data didn't fully transfer to your device, which is what happened to me and to some others, it's gone: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1diivt3/megathr...
> Options include keeping your data for three, 18, or 36 months, or indefinitely until you manually delete it.
So, if we Takeout our current data, we can squirrel that away on our own computer.
Also navigate the transition process perfectly, including the above settings, so history -- new history anyway -- will be preserved on Google servers. Will it then be available for decryptable download to the user's computer via Takeout? Or only to a replacement phone?
That encrypted backup isn't available via Takeout, only via the Google Maps app. You can use that backup to load your history to various devices or a replacement phone.
I have my Dad's history as well as mine, and a mapping app into which I can load both. Where the the two tracks coincide, I'm prompted to remember the occasion.
They frame it positively, of course ("now your data lives on your device!") but AFAICT it's all downside. I can't browse my location history on a nice big screen, and (very annoyingly) the app does not let you view your aggregate history over the span of a month or year -- only a single day. Plus, if you lose your phone, you lose all that precious data, unless you configure the app to automatically sync your history to Google's cloud...wait what? Wasn't not doing that the whole point? Just baffling.
Agree with you. I get the intention (a lot of people do find it troubling that all their location data is sent to Google, and appreciate this change), but I don't really care about that for my data, I just want to have everything available so I can analyze it!
The timeline backup is encrypted clientside before upload.
Meaning no casual FBI or police warrant is gonna vacuum it up (at least not from Google, they’ll just go to the cell providers / towers instead as siblings have pointed out).
Obviously yes NSA and CIA and various other nation state attackers will just get it directly off your phone or evil maid you or surveil you in any number of other more traditional ways.
I don't think this is true -- can you explain it? At least for those on US soil, since SCOTUS ruled on Carpenter v. United States, I believe you would need a warrant.
They can already do this via the cellular phone networks, which need your location to provide the service. Yes, they could discard that data once it was no longer needed, but that is subject to subpoena and preservation orders, so it's not that far to a location history DB anyways.
I don't think Googs knows what free is. They have replaced that word with "ad supported". If TLAs want access to that data, they can just pay for it like everyone else. Gives a whole new meaning to "targeted" ads
There's also a community of people with dedicated "tracking phones" or GPS beacons to record every place they go and store it in apps like https://fogofworld.app
The nice part is that it's not some data silo but that it supports open formats and you can import / export everything very easily.
Looking through that webpage, what I'm not finding are the format of the data, or any tools for exporting it. Is it possible to make use of the data without the FoW app, on a computer?
That's interesting, I found out that Youtube history data can be downloaded as well, I think I can also do a data analysis to look at my youtube viewing history and see what interesting things I can find. I wonder if anyone has already done something similar?
I haven't done it, but I want to.
A very important thing you should know is that only the most recent 5000 videos are kept in the history export, so my advice is to download it frequently.
What I've been doing is regularly getting the .json dumps takeout.google.com and merging them. (for around 4 years now)
I plan on eventually processing that data later to track usual statistics, but also for example my interests over the years (by grouping and then searching for common topics like Minecraft, Haskell, Covid, ...).
Thanks for the heads up! I thought that was the full amount of data.
My idea is to write a purely front-end application that takes a json file and uses a chart to visualize some interesting information by year, such as the most watched channels for the selected year
I wrote a tool a few years ago that could convert your Apple Health data export into a SQLite database. I haven't run it in a while though so there's a chance it doesn't work with the latest file format: https://github.com/dogsheep/healthkit-to-sqlite
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Very impressive system that had a big budget in the mid 2010s (mostly built by zurich, iirc). They even hired a bunch of tvcs to walk around movie theaters and scan the wifi ssids, so timeline could show you what movie you saw. It had a photos integration as well that would show the pics you took that day. All sorts of plans for more delightful features like that. I think the value prop was that deeply integrating people's memories made maps a stickier product.
The investment and headcount started getting cut post-pandemic, like everything else at Google. Lots of team churn, not just on Timeline but on hulk and the semantic location service which undergirded it. When I was last there SLS was literally 1 guy who either could not or would not leave. Those services became abandonware, along with all the flumes and postwrite processors responsible for cleaning up the data and enforcing heuristics. Exactly 0 people on the web UI - some of the directories were literally un-reviewable (the code owners had left and no one in geo had MPA-approval). That decay led to a noticeable decline in the accuracy of reported trips. Users weren't happy, angry reports started piling up about inaccurate/missing trips. It was embarassing. Timeline was moved to the back burner and the idea of being a cute time capsule for users no longer aligned with the AI maximalists.
By '22 the investment and headcount was slashed. IMO the ODLH death march was as much about throwing in the towel for Timeline as a product as it was about getting location data off of Google's servers.
> Options include keeping your data for three, 18, or 36 months, or indefinitely until you manually delete it.
So, if we Takeout our current data, we can squirrel that away on our own computer.
Also navigate the transition process perfectly, including the above settings, so history -- new history anyway -- will be preserved on Google servers. Will it then be available for decryptable download to the user's computer via Takeout? Or only to a replacement phone?
genuinely curious—why would you want this?
They frame it positively, of course ("now your data lives on your device!") but AFAICT it's all downside. I can't browse my location history on a nice big screen, and (very annoyingly) the app does not let you view your aggregate history over the span of a month or year -- only a single day. Plus, if you lose your phone, you lose all that precious data, unless you configure the app to automatically sync your history to Google's cloud...wait what? Wasn't not doing that the whole point? Just baffling.
I don't know why they needed to kill the web interface if they still let you 'backup' your location history to the cloud.
Meaning no casual FBI or police warrant is gonna vacuum it up (at least not from Google, they’ll just go to the cell providers / towers instead as siblings have pointed out).
Obviously yes NSA and CIA and various other nation state attackers will just get it directly off your phone or evil maid you or surveil you in any number of other more traditional ways.
Perhaps Google recognizes what an existential threat to a free society that is.
Deleted Comment
Hundreds of thousands of these per person, stored forever in a data centre somewhere.
Imagine how much carbon could have been saved by just fixing this to 1-2 decimal places.
The nice part is that it's not some data silo but that it supports open formats and you can import / export everything very easily.
What I've been doing is regularly getting the .json dumps takeout.google.com and merging them. (for around 4 years now)
I plan on eventually processing that data later to track usual statistics, but also for example my interests over the years (by grouping and then searching for common topics like Minecraft, Haskell, Covid, ...).
My idea is to write a purely front-end application that takes a json file and uses a chart to visualize some interesting information by year, such as the most watched channels for the selected year