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What's in my location history?
- mmarian 2y agoLooks like this shouldn't belong in Show HN as it's a (interesting!) blog post?
- dang 2y agoThat is correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. I've taken Show HN out of the title now.
- zdimension 2y agoI'm sorry, I had completely misunderstood what Show HN means. I thought it was the prefix for indicating the post was made by the poster (what the fine folks at Reddit would call "OC"). Somehow I had missed the https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html page.
- pvg 2y agoThat is confusing but you can do something similar-ish for a written self-post by writing a comment in the thread saying you're the author, etc. Tends to make the discussion somewhat better too since it seems to reduce tropey first post type comments.
- tgv 2y ago[flagged]
- zdimension 2y agoNot being a native speaker I thought the "Kindly enough" conveyed the sarcasm (since I think most people don't associate Google with being kind). I'll try to find a better wording (or maybe make the "Kindly enough" a link pointing the GDPR?) > One day, your insurance company may inquire if you have walked enough to be covered. [I think we're past that point.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...)
- andrewxdiamond 2y ago> Google had to be forced to allow this? When were they forced? Takeout came out in 2011, I don’t remember them being forced to do it
- kmarc 2y agoIf you mean "health insurance providers", then we already have that in Switzerland. My anecdata is when an obese acquaintance walked in to the (for profit) insurance company and asked for "extra" service; the insurer is not obliged to offer that to everyone (whereas there is also a compulsory insurance), simply based on the looks, I guess. I kinda loathe these insurance providers, however, I can't disagree with some of their policies (lack of exercise induced obesity and smoking is a big no in my book). So indeed, using the "walk enough" information is probably the future, OTOH countries without similar systems (UK, and Eastern Europe comes to my mind) have collapsing public healthcare where they can't filter out self destructing lifestyle, everyone bears the responsibility.
- blfr 2y agoGoogle had a Data Liberation Front before it was forced by regulation to enable bulk, machine-readable data downloading. Takeout is their product.
- nemo1618 2y agoI was very annoyed when Google recently announced they were deprecating Timeline for Web: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818?visit_id=638556278273004387-2402322077&p=maps_odlh&rd=1 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818?visit_id=638... 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.
- zdimension 2y agoAgree 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!
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoThen grab it from your device and analyse it. Why should everyone suffer just because you want to be sloppy with your personal data.
- zdimension 2y agoI mean, the choice would be nice. Allow people to turn on online sync, keep the data offline, or disable the location recording altogether.
- everybodyknows 2y ago> grab it from your device and analyse it By what means?
- zdimension 2y ago
- pomian 2y agoIt's there something like this for Apple?
- simonw 2y agoI 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 https://github.com/dogsheep/healthkit-to-sqlite
- xpressvideoz 2y ago> Best viewed with Netscape Communicator 4. I wonder if the author actually tests the site with Netscape!
- zdimension 2y agoI actually tried it on a VM a few months back, it was broken in a multitude of fun ways. I think it would be interesting to try and make it work. 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.
- djyde 2y agoThat'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?
- lexlambda 2y agoI 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, ...).
- djyde 2y agoThanks 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
- Grimeton 2y agoBiggest issue with this: No button to turn it off.
- chasil 2y agoGoogle provides a mechanism to disable location tracking. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en https://www.androidpolice.com/how-to-disable-google-location-tracking/ 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.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoThey're also purging server side location data and moving it to devices. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818 https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818 https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-history-and-new-controls-coming-soon-to-maps/ https://blog.google/products/maps/updates-to-location-histor... https://9to5google.com/2023/12/12/google-location-history-timeline-device/ 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-just-killed-geofence-warrants-police-location-data https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-... https://9to5google.com/2019/04/13/google-android-location-history-explained/ https://9to5google.com/2019/04/13/google-android-location-hi...
- privacyking 2y agoSo what? They almost certainly have other sources of location data. 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.
- dewey 2y agoThere'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 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.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y agoI don't think I ever understood Douglas Adams's quote about digital watches and going down from the trees more than I have today.
- everybodyknows 2y agoLooking 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?
- qingcharles 2y agoThis is neat. I need to find the smallest Android device I can now to keep in my backpack or pocket, that isn't my main phone.
- throwaway92038 2y agoTimeline 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.
- urbandw311er 2y agoAlso, let’s be honest, as trust in Google evaporated, the idea of you having all that data on our every move just became kinda creepy.
- nswanberg 2y agoI 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/megathread_google_maps_timeline_moving_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1diivt3/megathr...
- nickburns 2y ago> I ended up losing nearly 15 years of my Google Location history genuinely curious—why would you want this?
- nswanberg 2y agoMaking analyses like zdimension's, keeping a kind of automated diary, and occasionally looking up a spot I've been but can't quite remember.
- everybodyknows 2y agoI 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.
- nickburns 2y agothat's a nice thing to have.
- everybodyknows 2y ago> Follow the prompts to set up automatic backups. > 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?
- urbandw311er 2y ago> activityType": "WALKING", > "probability": 97.82699942588806 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.
- Tepix 2y agoIt's probably just a float value and they're only rendered as text for the data export that the user requested, don't you think?
- urbandw311er 2y agoI hadn’t considered that possibility but thanks for giving me hope!
- Adamou752 2y agohttps://whatismylocation.org/ https://whatismylocation.org/