> It's not like your entire maps history will be stored on the device exclusively.

Isn’t that what “more private and works on each device independently” implies?

Obviously we need more detail on the implementation here but AFAIK Timeline is the only time I’ve seen a full accounting of my location in the cloud. There will, I’m sure, be a lot of ways it can still be inferred: purchases, which IP address I’m on etc etc but if Google is stepping away from constantly streaming your phone GPS location to the cloud that’s surely a good thing.