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Location history was both surprisingly good and surprisingly bad in the past, but the last few times I looked it was less impressive. On the good side it used

Location history was both surprisingly good and surprisingly bad in the past, but the last few times I looked it was less impressive. On the good side it used to be remarkably accurate at identifying and tracking stops along with routes I had driven. At the same time it would have occasional astonishing jumps such as the 15 minutes I once spent in South Korea during the middle of the day. At some point they appeared to dumb it down pretty radically and it would no longer even recognize that I had been at a location even when I had been there for hours. These days I use a separate unfortunately discontinued app for tracking location and uploading to my own cloud storage a few times a day. I've given up on Google not being evil, but it might be nice if they could avoid being so freaking creepy.

MetalGuru 8y ago
Can I ask why you keep your own location history?
- yoz-y 8y ago
  Not parent but personally I keep my location so if I lose something I can retrace my steps. It already saved me once from having to redo all of my documents, changing locks etc.
- sdfsdfsdfsdf3 8y ago
  Many people (self included) I know use it for when their drunk out of their brains on Friday and Saturday evening. Where the fcuk did I go last night? Blackouts are less severe when you can collaborate your steps (~pub crawl, taxi home, what time i get home) with Google Timeline. Tbh, I dont think I've ever used it for anything else
- fencepost 8y ago
  Inertia at this point, but it started out as a help for billing clients when working onsite. A chunk of my work requires billable onsite visits and I was bad about tracking arrival and departure times as I arrived and departed. At this point the software I'm using for mileage tracking covers that (and will show my route using a certain ubiquitous mapping system), but I still have that package generating kml files and uploading them twice a day. Edit: looks like just over 5 years of daily kml files, likely mostly useful for showing just how few new places I go.
- cmroanirgo 8y ago
  I've used it in the past when travelling abroad so family members can keep track of where I am. Like the OP, I don't use google, because of the creepiness of it all, but hosted my own as uploaded kml files. I set up a GPS logger to save my pos every 1/2 hour or so to keep battery usage light.
  - weinzierl 8y ago
    Which GPS logger do you use? I tried a few, but they were all a pain. I'm primarily interested in tagging photos of my cameras that don't have their own GPS.
    - fencepost 8y ago
      If you can find an apk I'm using Backitude (gaugler.backitude), notable for using location 'steals' when some other app gets location rather than directly querying on its own. I just have it write to a kml file locally, and another program syncs that folder to cloud storage 2x daily. It's also capable of pinging a url with location data if you prefer. Edit: this may be interesting from someone else actively using it for their own tracking and reporting (includes parsing scripts) https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/ https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/
- 13of40 8y ago
  I got a traffic ticket on vacation in Germany a year or two ago. All the car rental place gave me was a timestamp, but I was able to use that and my Facebook location history to find out where it happened.
- creato 8y ago
  Personally, I don't view my location history as particularly sensitive information. Only slightly more sensitive than my home address, and I trust google far more than the dozens of other entities that know my home address not to divulge this information (either intentionally or by leaks). At the same time, I get some slight value out of it. I find the history (and the monthly reminder e-mails that location history is on) mildly interesting to look at every now and then. On very rare occasions, I've been able to get some specific usefulness out of location history (I found a restaurant I previously visited on a road trip).
chopin 8y ago
If the data is occasionally bad, but law enforcement relies on it, bad things will happen. Now that I think of it bad things will happen as well even if the data was accurate.
- fencepost 8y ago
  The data points surrounding those anomalies were reasonable, and the main sets of jumps I saw were either in places where I likely had poor GPS penetration or were quite old (back to the Google Latitude days). There were also precision indicators for many that made it pretty clear that they were locations based on connecting to a relatively distant cell tower. My expectation for the absurd jumps was that Google was calculating locations based on identifying WiFi devices in the vicinity and that for some devices there were duplicate MACs distributed in different regions (or possibly that the MAC on some equipment was being set from configuration rather than being hard-coded). I did not check to see if any of them were 00:DE:AD:BE:EF or the like since I generally only noticed several weeks after the event.

MetalGuru 8y ago

Can I ask why you keep your own location history?

yoz-y 8y ago
Not parent but personally I keep my location so if I lose something I can retrace my steps. It already saved me once from having to redo all of my documents, changing locks etc.
sdfsdfsdfsdf3 8y ago
Many people (self included) I know use it for when their drunk out of their brains on Friday and Saturday evening. Where the fcuk did I go last night? Blackouts are less severe when you can collaborate your steps (~pub crawl, taxi home, what time i get home) with Google Timeline. Tbh, I dont think I've ever used it for anything else
fencepost 8y ago
Inertia at this point, but it started out as a help for billing clients when working onsite. A chunk of my work requires billable onsite visits and I was bad about tracking arrival and departure times as I arrived and departed. At this point the software I'm using for mileage tracking covers that (and will show my route using a certain ubiquitous mapping system), but I still have that package generating kml files and uploading them twice a day. Edit: looks like just over 5 years of daily kml files, likely mostly useful for showing just how few new places I go.
cmroanirgo 8y ago
I've used it in the past when travelling abroad so family members can keep track of where I am. Like the OP, I don't use google, because of the creepiness of it all, but hosted my own as uploaded kml files. I set up a GPS logger to save my pos every 1/2 hour or so to keep battery usage light.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  Which GPS logger do you use? I tried a few, but they were all a pain. I'm primarily interested in tagging photos of my cameras that don't have their own GPS.
  - fencepost 8y ago
    If you can find an apk I'm using Backitude (gaugler.backitude), notable for using location 'steals' when some other app gets location rather than directly querying on its own. I just have it write to a kml file locally, and another program syncs that folder to cloud storage 2x daily. It's also capable of pinging a url with location data if you prefer. Edit: this may be interesting from someone else actively using it for their own tracking and reporting (includes parsing scripts) https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/ https://petermolnar.net/location-tracking-without-server/
13of40 8y ago
I got a traffic ticket on vacation in Germany a year or two ago. All the car rental place gave me was a timestamp, but I was able to use that and my Facebook location history to find out where it happened.
creato 8y ago
Personally, I don't view my location history as particularly sensitive information. Only slightly more sensitive than my home address, and I trust google far more than the dozens of other entities that know my home address not to divulge this information (either intentionally or by leaks). At the same time, I get some slight value out of it. I find the history (and the monthly reminder e-mails that location history is on) mildly interesting to look at every now and then. On very rare occasions, I've been able to get some specific usefulness out of location history (I found a restaurant I previously visited on a road trip).

chopin 8y ago

If the data is occasionally bad, but law enforcement relies on it, bad things will happen. Now that I think of it bad things will happen as well even if the data was accurate.

fencepost 8y ago
The data points surrounding those anomalies were reasonable, and the main sets of jumps I saw were either in places where I likely had poor GPS penetration or were quite old (back to the Google Latitude days). There were also precision indicators for many that made it pretty clear that they were locations based on connecting to a relatively distant cell tower. My expectation for the absurd jumps was that Google was calculating locations based on identifying WiFi devices in the vicinity and that for some devices there were duplicate MACs distributed in different regions (or possibly that the MAC on some equipment was being set from configuration rather than being hard-coded). I did not check to see if any of them were 00:DE:AD:BE:EF or the like since I generally only noticed several weeks after the event.