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.
> 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?
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en
https://www.androidpolice.com/how-to-disable-google-location...
I've seen this as a small part in more general articles on increasing privacy in all of your Google settings.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818
https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-histor...
https://9to5google.com/2023/12/12/google-location-history-ti...
From the last link, importantly:
> Update 12/15: This change means that Google will no longer respond to geofence warrants from law enforcement that request information on all devices near a particular incident.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-...
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/13/google-android-location-hi...
99% of google apps will harvest your personal data by default.
e.g. gboard will send google the name of the app you use their keyboard in every time it's used. the google dialer will send the phone number of every received call to google (for caller and spam ID). Google pay sends every transaction you make to google (including the date, merchant, amount, etc) If you use google photos with backup disabled, they will literally nag you every time you open the app, requesting that you sync their photos - and they use dark patterns to hinder your attempt to decline this.
Not to mention that it has been opt-in for years.
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.
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.
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
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 wonder if the author actually tests the site with Netscape!
There is a very nice blog post about someone explaining how they modified their website's CSS to work with some old browser, maybe Netscape, maybe something else, it was well written and fun to follow, but I cannot for the life of me remember where it was from. Maybe someone will read this comment and know what blog post I'm talking about.
