Back in December, Google announced that Maps Location History would soon be stored on your phone instead of the cloud. This change to the Google Maps Timeline is continuing to roll out, and will see the deprecation of Your Timeline on the web.
When that location data was stored in Google’s servers, it was subject to broad geofence warrants that allowed law enforcement to request all information about devices near a particular incident. With this change, Google no longer has the ability to respond to those requests.
As part of this change, Location History is now called “Timeline.” That information has long been used by the popular “Your Timeline” feature that shows where you’ve been, including the specific locations you might have visited. This data is grouped into Trips, Places, Cities, and World (countries), while Google also generates Insights, like how far you traveled on a particular mode of transport.
The Your Timeline feature will continue to work in Google Maps for Android and iOS. However, this new on-device storage model means “Timeline for Web Maps will be going away.”
Since the data shown on your Timeline comes directly from your device, Timeline won’t be available on Maps on your computer after your data is moved to your phone
Top comment by bryan
Our data could easily have been stored encrypted in our accounts, such that we could access it from any logged-in device. This supposed privacy motivation is clearly a lame excuse to shut down yet another beloved Google product.
I wish Timeline had become the center of all Google products, capturing the stories of our lives as we go places, send emails, and use every other Google product. Everything we do, including our Undo histories, could have been captured along a single navigable Timeline. It should have gotten strong calendar integration — planning future trips should have been just as strongly emphasized as reflecting on past trips. Journaling features should have been rolled out. But instead we never even got the missing borders.
I just wish they'd spun Timeline out into a startup that has the vision of capturing the stories of our lives. I'd gladly pay for such a product.
Some people are quite upset about the loss of google.com/maps/timeline, which hasn’t been visually updated in ages, as they used the web UI heavily.
You will receive an email and app notifications once this change is available on your account. Google has been slowly rolling it out in recent months and it’s still not yet widely available. The company warns how:
If you don’t update your settings by the deadline in the emails and notifications you receive, you may lose some or all of your Timeline data, like your visits and routes.
Once enabled, you will have the option to “automatically back up your Timeline if you need to switch devices.” This involves an end-to-end encrypted copy of your data being stored on Google’s servers that only you can access.
From there, you can “move an existing backup to a different device or import your Timeline on a new device.”
More on Google Maps:
- New York City is using Google Maps to help you find a public bathroom
- Google Business Messages in Maps and Search shutting down
- Simplified Google Maps bottom bar rolling out on Android
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