These are amazing ETL skills, but a big red flag, I thought I was watching the revival of the infamous Overly Attached Girlfriend. As someone said there, this is great and scary at the same time.
Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled:
A) they are Google employees
B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them
How can you infer that? She clearly had access to his location history, it's extremely unlikely that it happened without his consent. This is rather a vibe of two enthusiastic geeks being genuinely curious about analyzing some cool data about themselves, rather than anyone being "overly attached". We can't tell for sure without more details about their relationship, which isn't our business at all, so talking about "big red flags" feels really wrong and paternalistic (which in fact sounds like a big red flag :P).
> Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history?
How can I infer that? Easily… if she is openly able to do this. What are those things that she is quietly doing? If she already has access to his location, chances are that one night at 7 PM when he hasn’t come back, she is checking for patterns.
Funny how everyone is so oblivious and saying ‘ohhh I find it so cute’
I agree, sometimes. But doing a full data-science analysis of where me and my partner where for the past 7-8 years to see how close we where, even though we are already together, doesn’t sound promising either.
Nevertheless, I think in general, people should learn that some will agree and others will disagree. There is no wrong or right. If some of you find this ‘cute’ and ‘amazing’ that is perfect. You should also understand and respect that some others find this ‘creepy’, ‘disturbing’ and a big ‘red flag’ for insecurity and annoying attachment.
Curiosity is now a red flag? I find the whole thing cute. She's not using the data for tracking down Dan and making him her boyfriend, they are already together and she simply wanted to see if they walked past each other in the past.
I do have my location history activated, and so does lots of people around me. I'm neither a Google employee nor am I ignorant that Google tracks me both physically and digitally.
But being able to have a timeline of where I am at times have been both helpful and interesting, so I'm willing to trade that data for the functionality I receive for it.
If you do know of a better solution that gives me the same data but is not Google, please feel free to share it. I haven't found anything like that that completely abuses my battery at the same time and also guarantees to not sell my data.
I periodically experiment with location history. I currently have it enabled to be able to see my own history and I also record it locally with a third-party app that saves it to my phone. I've compared the location data and looked for patterns or anything at all interesting. I've also thought about building an app to basically give you the same functionality as Google's location history while keeping all the data out of the cloud and in your direct possession. I think it can be useful and interesting to have this data on yourself, I just think Google shouldn't have it.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. The third-party app only records my GPS coordinates and I process the data myself. Unfortunately, there isn't anything yet that has any of the functionality of Google's location history.
I leave the feature on and I'm not a Google employee or ignorant of the fact Google tracks my location data. I find value in having the data myself and don't care that Google also has it. I also just asked my girlfriend if she has disabled it and she hasn't. She isn't a Google employee and is aware it is being recorded. So there are 2 more people. Is it possible you are in fact in the minority in disabling it?
Same here, I believe that I get more value from this data than Google does. I'm sure someone at X (insert any service that has a lot of data I've generated) has done something that I wouldn't be ok with with someones data. But as Scott Hanselman has said; "Microsoft isn’t nearly as organized as it’d need to be to be as evil as you think it is."
I don't think I have ever in my life thought "I wish I had location history turned on so I could check where I was at that date". Could you share some examples of how can it be useful?
I do find it cool to have such data to do the kind of analysis as presented in this post, but not cool enough to let others (especially Google) possess this data as well.
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.
To me this is an amazing tool to extract lost memories. I look at random tracks in history sometimes, and it’s surprising how much can you remember from that day that you would never remember otherwise.
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.
Everyone already replied with their use cases and I've been in several similar ones.
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 the last time (at the beginning of the pandemic) that I went in to the office.
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.
It's great to be able to answer questions like "when did we go on that trip to X" or "how long has it been since we went to Y".
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.
I had my catalytic converter stolen. Thanks to location history I could check when I left the car there and when I came back and noticed the problem. Since at first I didn't know problem was result of a theft I didn't take note of the time when I noticed the problem and I also could recall for how long the car stayed there.
Location history enabled me to accurately and confidently report the time window when crime occurred to the police.
I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
> I suspect the outcome is still the same of your catalytic converter being gone for good, even if it helped you narrow down details for a police report.
Correct.
> As such, the utility is still zero, since the desired outcome is "get my property back", unless you needed this many details for insurance purposes (they usually only ask for a police report, and police are happy to take any data since they are unlikely to find the perpetrator anyway).
That was not the desired outcome. My desired outcome was to make reporting to the police go as smoothly for me as possible which I'd preferably entirely skip if not for the fact that insurer required me to report it.
Talking to the police (or anyone really) is a stressful event for me so any help with establishing what to say was very much appreciated.
On semi-related note my car is at repair shop for 3 months already and I have no idea how much longer will it be because apparently no supplier of catalytic converters is willing to estimate when they'll have a single item for Toyota Auris.
Sure, but when I had my radio stolen back in the day, police officer politely notified me that they know who generally breaks into cars to steal radios in my area, but unless it was reported in an hour or two, they won't be able to get it before it's resold or pin it on the culprit, so unless I need it for insurance, I shouldn't even bother reporting.
In cases like these, insurance mostly needs a paper trail, and police are very well aware of that, and they won't look for specifics. They'll probably even suggest what to fill in: that's at least my experience.
I feel for your experience though, and I wish you your car back on the road asap.
I'm not running any services that would report this data back to Google on my devices. I'm aware that it can still collect some data on me based on my browsing and how I connect to a couple of their services I still happen to use, but I'm fairly certain that it's nowhere near the fidelity of what location history would give them and I prefer it to stay this way.
Other replies so far have actually convinced me that I don't need to reconsider it, as the benefits seem minuscule compared to the price ;)
Also, how come 2 people be so ok with Google having all their location history? There are only two reasons why someone leaves that function enabled:
A) they are Google employees B) totally ignorant to the fact that Google tracks them