Do you really think turning that setting off stops google from collecting it and giving it to the police?

I basically use it as a type of diary. Sometimes the use is just remembering what I did on a particular day for nostalgia purposes, other times it's practical. Couldn't remember when exactly I bought something (but it was a shop I don't go to often) so had a look on my timeline and found the date and claimed on a warranty.

It also gives you data you can look at when analysing your life - e.g. how often I go to a friends, how long I spend walking in a week, how fast particular routes are to work, etc. When I used to fill in timesheets it was an easy record of what time I got to work each day. There's a fairly basic nerdy pleasure from having these facts available. Yes, I could collect this information manually and keep these records myself but that is quite a lot of work which I'd prefer spend doing other things.

I've also used it to piece together the previous night after getting blackout drunk in a foreign city.

Thankfully older accounts are set to auto delete being “off”.

It does have a bug though, if the place you visited changes its name, your history will say you visited $NEW_PLACE instead of $OLD_PLACE.

So if you went to an e.g. Hilton in Berlin in 2018, and in the meantime they shut down/move, and some companies (let's say Facebook) set up offices in the former hotel, if you look in your history, it will say you spent the nights in Facebook offices in Berlin..

Course there is. Always is. How badly do you want it?

OwnTracks, Traccar, etc - lots more on F-Droid.