from Hacker News

What's in my location history?

by zdimension on 6/30/24, 9:45 PM with 56 comments

  • by throwaway92038 on 7/3/24, 10:25 PM

    Timeline 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.

  • by nswanberg on 7/3/24, 10:36 PM

    I 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/megathr...

  • by nemo1618 on 7/3/24, 6:29 PM

    I was very annoyed when Google recently announced they were deprecating Timeline for Web: 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.

  • by urbandw311er on 7/4/24, 12:30 AM

    > 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.

  • by dewey on 7/3/24, 9:34 PM

    There'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

    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.

  • by djyde on 7/3/24, 7:39 PM

    That'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?

  • by Adamou752 on 7/7/24, 12:35 AM

  • by pomian on 7/3/24, 7:06 PM

    It's there something like this for Apple?

  • by mmarian on 7/2/24, 2:56 PM

    Looks like this shouldn't belong in Show HN as it's a (interesting!) blog post?

  • by Grimeton on 7/3/24, 7:46 PM

    Biggest issue with this: No button to turn it off.

  • by xpressvideoz on 7/3/24, 7:17 PM

    > Best viewed with Netscape Communicator 4.

    I wonder if the author actually tests the site with Netscape!