Google will delete new accounts' data by default in 18 months

I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged.

Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy.

When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.

https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/

In general, I think "privacy as a right" is a better approach for society. If people want to opt out of privacy, they should have that ability, but that should be a choice.

Edit: Turns out it doesn't actually provide a location history visualization like GMaps does - it only shows "significant locations" - but to my knowledge there's no technical reason it couldn't do so

I too really like this data, specifically location history. It's come in extremely handy for a number of reasons, whether finding a restaurant I really liked but forgot the name of, finding exact dates and times when I was in certain places (which is handy to know if said place had a COVID-19 outbreak, for example).

You should be allowed to make trade offs between privacy and convenience where it’s available, but it should be transparent exactly what tradeoff you’re making.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.

I believe we should have control over our own data, and it looks like Google is giving us that.

So I'm glad we can choose to enable/disable this ourselves.

There is no trade off because you can have both! It's just that Google doesn't offer this.

One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet).

I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.

You wouldn't be in the minority if you thought of it this way.

If after an exam I would spontaneously say: “I absolutely did not cheat on question 3 of the test!”, what would you assume I’d have done on questions 1 and 2?

Worthless, commercially - yes.

But priceless and utterly invaluable for historical interest and academic research! I hope Google keeps their Ngram, search-stats and even geolocation history for everyone (anonymized and aggregated, of course) - it'll be an invaluable tool for researchers of all kinds to be able to see, for example, how our movement patterns varied from ~2015 when we started collecting that en-mass to some point in the future.

Ditto Google Street View archives - Street View is now almost 13 years old and I'm looking forward to being able to see how things were in everyday life back in 2008 compared to however things are when I'm old and grey).

For an average user, sure. But suppose the user suddenly becomes e.g. an important politician. Now having their history older than 90 days is interesting.

Hard disks are cheap, you can keep everything and wait for the ticket that wins the lottery. If you are a company like Google of Facebook, it is almost guaranteed that you will have juicy material about most people who become important in a few decades. In a few decades, any politician who says "anti-trust" will immediately have their porn history or edgy things they wrote as a teenager leaked to public.

On the Photo map you can see your photos grouped by location, on the normal photo timeline grouped by year/month/day and the ML powered search is good enough to recognize stuff like “book”, “restaurant”, “beach” etc.

The original post from Google had this line https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-p...

"As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."

I hadn't used my account in a while and was going to just "delete" what I could and keep the account. They have a "download your data" button but refused to let me use it claiming they couldn't be sure it was really my account (but not providing any way to convince them), so at that point I decided to delete. Hopefully they did actually delete it. For me, it still showed the older history after I enabled the "delete" older history option (possibly it would have been removed after some delay), so I manually deleted it (it wasn't all that much) and that did seem to remove it.

- Write your own mobile app that has access to fine grained location, logs it, and periodically uploads the location trace to your own server.

- Download the traces from your server and convert them to an appropriate format.

- Upload the traces to Google MyMaps - or use a map rendering engine you control if avoiding 3rd party online services is a goal - for visualization

By doing this you give up additional features provided by Google Location history - things like semantic place detections (i.e you were at airport X or mall Y) trace error correction, auto-segmentation of traces, etc.

But if all you care about is a seeing a trace on a map, then that should work.

This general approach is already widely used by software that has an external location logging system (i.e. wildlife tracking transmitters, commercial vehicle fleet tracking) but need to visualize/track those on a map.

Disclosure: Google employee but not currently working on Maps.

Use GPSLogger[1] to record the position. It can auto-upload to pretty much anything from DropBox to SFTP (FTP over SSH). It can auto-start on boot, run in background, and rotate files daily. (If you do SFTP, use ForceCommand internal-sftp in sshd_config to restrict the phone to file transfers.) No excessive energy usage.

Use GPSMapper[2] to visualize the GPX files on phone, or https://www.gpxsee.org/ on Linux (this tool works well even with hundreds of GPX files loaded, unlike all others I've tried).

None of the viewers are really "nice" unfortunately.

If someone needs a side project idea, a personal location history visualizer would be nice. All existing tools focus on individual tracks (eg day hikes), there's nothing that does much useful when you dump a few years worth of history into it. Actually most just freeze or crash. But there's so much that could be done (performance, filtering by time, exporting/sharing specific parts, postprocessing like removing outliers, correcting cut corners by matching against a map, detecting places/businesses and hyperlinking to services like AllTrails, visualizations like speed over time (this part is common) but auto-detecting and showing this for all traces along the same route (no software does this yet) (think "how fast was I on which part of my commute each day over the past year"), multi user eg. family capability, etc.)

Of course even if viewers are limited today, one can still collect the data in case someone writes a better viewer tomorrow ;-)

Google Takeout can export raw location history, and there are tools to convert that standard GPX.

Only issue I have with GPSLogger is that the accuracy filter is not adaptive. At a high value, you'll get outliers, at a low value, it won't record during flights.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...

OTOH, if you claim you've gotten rid of data to one party, and then another party is able to dig that same data up in a legal proceeding, I expect the first party might be upset, and seek compensation.

Quite apart from that, if you have metrics that show long tail data are infrequently accessed, but do take up an appreciable (and ever growing) amount of resources, it's a OpEx/engineering win to actually get rid of that on a proactive basis.

So, you'd need to vet an ultra secure team, who is not allowed to talk about this data both to use and store it. Or you have to publish a representation to wider teams telling them 'these are secret feautures'. So, you'd need a secret code base nobody is allowed to talk about.

Corporations can do shady things, but it's hard to imagine this old data being useful anyway, to be worth all this hassle and possible repercussions.

so if you set it up for 3 months today, then any data on and before 3/15/2020 will be deleted

On topic: this just in, person (corporation) who has lied and abused your privacy many times says they promise not to do it anymore, more at 11.

This seems to contradict "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"

"The government can also get older unopened emails without notifying the customer if they get a court order that requires them to offer "specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe" the emails are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation" — a higher bar than a subpoena."