A guy I worked for long ago was part of a partnership of architects and they split up. One of the other partners was known for never parting amicably and sued him. He claimed they had agreed on something and my client had failed to deliver and thus owed him some large sum. He presented notes he had allegedly taken during the talk they had a few years earlier including date and time and the word of another partner as support, who claimed to have been present.

My client checked his old calendars and just found the word "Copenhagen" for that + the previous day. With a bit of searching and checking, he figured out that he was incredibly lucky: he had been in Copenhagen that day to sail in a regatta, had lots of witnesses and photographs and easily won the case, the other two got into hot water for falsifying documents and giving false statements, though I don't know the outcome.

He was lucky to have had a multi-day thing and putting it into his calendar. Not sure if "Google showed me being far away" would've stood up, but it can certainly be useful to know your location a few years ago.

On a more practical note, I visited a random restaurant in a town I was visiting which turned out to be an amazing place. Didn’t remember the name. A few years later I’m in the same town and would not have found the place if not for the location history.

In general, I obtain a huge amount of value in being able to know what happened in my own past. This can be both for work and for personal reasons. For this, my calendar and Google Timeline are the two tools I use the most.

Most usefulness is in the past 1-2 weeks, and things become less useful over time, right up until they become extremely useful. For example "Oh crap, I lost this thing, the last time I saw it was on this date. What are the possible places I could have lost it? Let's retrace."

It's hard to convey how much things change once you're able to reliably have this information. Your mindset changes. Things you couldn't do before are unlocked.

I would love a better Google Timeline, one whose data I personally own especially. I suspect there will be an explosion of these types of apps at some point once people catch up.

When was it the conference was at "that town".

Sure there's other ways to find the information but I don't mind having it tracked. To each his own but I find more value in it than I think I give up.

I live in the UK, but I can go back to May 2014 and see everywhere I went in Florida on a holiday. Every restaurant, theme park, shop etc.

It's a great way to take a trip down memory lane.

I also use it on a day-to-day basis - e.g. if I need to record what hours I worked on a certain day, I can use it to give me an approximate time I went out for lunch.

Location history enabled me to accurately and confidently report the time window when crime occurred to the police.