Dawarich: Self-hosted alternative to Google Location History | Hacker News Reader

Dawarich: Self-hosted alternative to Google Location History

github.com

164 pointsthunderbong46 comments

I currently use Owntracks for this. The backend is a very simple dockerized python script.

https://github.com/nicbou/homeserver/tree/master/gps-logger

It has been very reliable, except for the OS not launching Owntracks reliably on boot. Above all, it reliably queues pings while offline.

This project supports Owntracks import it seems.

> import your location history from Google Maps Timeline and Owntracks

That is correct. It's brilliant!

Maybe nice to know: "Da war ich" is German for "There I was".

Funny enough I’m (east) German and my first association was the Russian word “tovarisch” (meaning comrade or friend).

Wondering what Dr. Freud would say about that…

LOL! I'm originally from Russia, living in Germany and suffering through my German studies -- of course, my first thought was 'tovarisch'. Facepaw.

Hehe, I myself am actually Dutch but this fell within the knowledge obtained in 2 years of obligatory German lessons in High School. Also, German and Dutch are very similar (actually I remember my grand mother having a conversation with a German women, both in their own language, both screaming, understanding each other reasonably well, or at least, they took turns saying something :))

Not relevant to this since it's a Google Timeline issue, but: I remember visiting a restaurant; a few months later the restaurant closed down and a barber shop took over the premises. Google Timeline now thinks I visited a barber shop back then.

If Google tracks me at work, it just saves "work" as the location. How do I know? Well, my workplace has since moved, but timelines before the move now show me go to the old location, then suddenly teleport me to the new one.

Ha... a pointer reuse problem.

This is an issue with even Star-ing / saving a place in google maps. I occasionally see some place I bookmarked in google maps either change into something completely different, or even move locations significantly.

Yeah, I want to somehow address this too, Dawarich will suggest a place that you visited and will keep it inside a visit record, so it won't be overridden if some other business will open there instead.

I like it, especially with the ability to import Google Location History. I also like the name, assuming I'm pronouncing it right :)

I'm currently using Home Assistant for keeping track where I've been, but the update frequency is rather low (to save my phone's battery, presumably, despite often having the little location access indicator on screen).

Perhaps someone here has any experience with OwnTracks/Overland? This looks pretty good, but I'm curious about the extra battery usage.

I use OwnTracks on its most aggressive mode "significant change" and it doesn't even have 1% on iOS under "Battery usage".

This is the least aggressive mode per the docs http://owntracks.org/features/location/

FYI your link is a 404

Weird bug in safari. Share url gives me the link above, but selecting the url bar gives me the correct link https://owntracks.org/booklet/features/location/

Arguably a bug in the site: Safari uses the "canonical location" (if available) when sharing links, which e.g. shares the real URL when sharing an AMP link.

This particular site's canonical location tag seems to be wrong:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://owntracks.org/features/location/" />

Oops, you're right!

I’m going to have to check that out, I’m using Traccar and it’s using 5-7% and only gives me a location point every 200 seconds. How often does your location update?

I was corrected by someone else, it's based on "signifigant" change, so when I am stationary it doesn't ping a lot, and days where I am very active it pings a lot.

I've been walking a lot today, so it has created around 100 pings around Copenhagen over the span of a few hours, and it still haven't used 1% battery on my iPhone 13 Mini.

I have tracked my location since 2017, I've built a small Rails application and I am using OwnTracks.

This project looks really cool, I haven't focused as much on visualisations or stats, but I have different output formats that I needed for tax-purposes as I was taxable in 2 countries.

Hi, what kind of output formats do you have in your app? Maybe I'd like to have them in Dawarich too :)

heatmap.py[1] + GPSLogger[2] for a low(er) tech solution.

[1] http://sethoscope.net/heatmap/ , https://github.com/sethoscope/heatmap

[2] https://github.com/mendhak/gpslogger/

GPSLogger is no longer in the app store, unfortunately

Hadn't noticed. I'm F-Droid only.

Use https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium if you don't want to install F-Droid.

I really liked Google Timeline, but started going away from it (in my de-google phase right now), it was nice to go back to when I had been biking a specific place in town, but couldn't remember exactly where.

And I have also been doing some PolarSteps for quite a while, but wanted to start making my own travel books now.

This seems like a perfect tool for both of this!

(iOS user, so seems like the space a little more limited)

Neat!

I've been using Home Assistant for this in the past, although I've disabled it since it seems to report every single tracking point via the network, which isn't great for battery life (or alternatively leads to very coarse tracking). I've been looking for something that does effectively the same thing, but aggregates updates and only syncs them every once in a while.

Regarding this section of the readme:

> To import your Google Maps Timeline data, download your location history from Google Takeout and upload it to Dawarich.

Does that still work, given that Google seems to have started end-to-end encrypting their location history?

Update: Seems like they've addressed that in the wiki, and there is now a new process: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich/wiki/How-to-import-your-G...

Interesting. I run orienteering and uses NextCloud to visualize my activities (from a Garmin watch). Question from a colleague: Would it be possible to navigate from you own track (like a GPS navigator) if you wanted to revisit your own tracks?

How do you like NextCloud for this? I've been thinking of setting up a Next Cloud for other reasons and would love to kill two birds with one stone so to speak.

I'm not sure if I got the question but feel free to join the discord server and we'll have a chat about it!

Can you link to the orienteering project? I am having a hard time tracking it down.

Looks interesting, I was using my own small app to do that and even know about Google Timeline somehow (well, I always disable anything-Google anyway).

However, I didn't manage to set it up. It's supposed to be just docker-compose up, but that ended up in some sort of infinite loop for me (I think it's migrations, but didn't really see the errors, since logs are running fast and I didn't use less).

Something similar, but entirely on (iOS) device, and focused on tracking activities based on location (hours at work, shopping, travelling, etc): https://apps.apple.com/au/app/life-cycle-track-your-time/id1... (No affiliation, just a user)

Would be neat if it could also import location from Garmin/Strava for the folks who don’t carry their phone when they’re out for a run.

Dawarich supports importing GPX files, I think both Garmin and Strava can export to this format

Neat, thanks!

This looks great, thanks for sharing. I'll give it a spin on my RPI.

What a tongue-twister for English speakers, though :)

For those who don't know, "Da war ich" is german for "i was there".

Does this require leaving location services on at all times? Or can it turn it on/off itself just to get an update? I always leave location off just because I don't want google or other apps knowing where I am at all times.

It depends on how detailed you want your location history to be and also on how you configure your mobile app. Both Overland and Owntracks allow enabling and disabling location tracking. And what they have tracked is being sent to Dawarich, so it's up to client's config.

If it could do that, then Google could do that too, right?

technically it probably already can, but I think the bigger issue is, does it? because if so, then that would be a major privacy violation IMO

Could not import my 10 year + google history hosting it in my raspberypi 5. The number of pending tasks was over 2 million after one day. I guess it was not optimized for large imports, sadly :(

Anyone knows how it compares to owntracks?

It has more features :)

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