Google tracks your location for its own services and for 3rd-party applications as well. So today I want to teach you about Google Location History.
You may not know exactly how much Google tracks your location but today I’ll show you how you can view, manage and delete everything that Google knows about where you are. Firstly, Android’s location feature and the Google Location History are two different things. You can have Android’s location feature enabled, but tell Google that you don’t want it to keep track of this over extended periods of time.
Google uses this location history as a way for it to improve the services that it can bring to you. For example, Google can learn that you leave to go to work every day at 8am.
Once it realizes this, its Google Now feature can start to give you warnings about problematic traffic. This way, if the traffic is bad then you’ll get a notice 5, 10 or 15 minutes before 8am to tell you about it and suggest that you leave a little earlier than normal. This feature alone can be invaluable for some and I hope that this sheds a little light as to why Google wants to keep track of your location history. Remember Google’s motto, Don’t Be Evil. This stored data is made anonymous when they store it on their servers too. So don’t think they’re able to identify you because of this data.
Disable Google Location History
To access Google’s Location History, you’ll want to launch the Settings of your Android device and then scroll down and tap on the Location option. This will bring you to a sub menu that tells you if Android’s location service is enabled. If it isn’t, then you’ll need to enable it if you want to access Google Location History from your device. With it enabled, look toward the bottom and you should see a Location Services section called Google Location History(like the image at the top of this article). Tapping on this will bring you to a page like the image you see above.
It will have an on/off switch for your account as a whole, and then it will have an on/off switch for the specific device you are using at this time. Under this, you’ll even see a list of all the other smartphones and tablet that you have connected to your account and you’ll be able to toggle enable or disable Google Location History for each of those devices. If you don’t want Google keeping location history data about one of your devices then you can simply toggle the feature off from here. However this will not delete the data. It will only disable it. So, if you want to delete the Google Location History then you’ll need to take a step further.
Delete Google Location History
At the bottom of this Google Location History page, you’ll see an option to do exactly that. It’s just a big button at the bottom that says “Delete Location History”. When you tap on this big button, you’ll see a confirmation dialog box pop up. This dialog box warns you that it will be erasing all the device location history that Google has collected and there will be no way of restoring this data(because the data is stored on Google’s servers, not your device). You’ll need to tap a confirmation box to tell Google you understand and then you’ll be able to tap the Delete button to wipe all of this data from Google’s servers.
Now, if you just delete this data but you don’t disable this service, Google will continue to track your location history. Deleting the history will get rid of all the places you have been before today, but if you keep the service enabled then Google will continue to track your location history from this point onward. So, if you want to get rid of your Google Location History and prevent Google from collecting this data in the future then you’ll need to disable the service and delete the data. I just want you to understand these are two different things and you’ll need to do both if you want to wash your hands clean of this service.
View Google Location History
Not everyone wants to get rid of this data as it can be incredibly useful to them. For those people, you still might be curious exactly where Google knows you have been For you, you’ll need to go into this Location History section of Android’s Settings. But instead of scrolling down and tapping on the Delete Location History button, you’ll want to look at the top right of the page and tap on the 3-dot menu that you see in the corner. This will open up a menu and you’ll see a View/Manage option for you to tap on.
Tapping on this View/Manage button will open up an Open With prompt on your device(assuming you have Google Maps and Browser like Chrome installed). So from here, you’ll be able to choose where you want to view this location history data in Google Maps, or if you just want it to open up the page within a web browser. The results in the same no matter which option you choose. It’s only the presentation that will be different for you. What you get though, is a map of your country and a bunch of spots where Google has logged your device’s location.
You can even specify a time period to look through. So, if you want to see where you traveled over the holidays, you could select December of 2015 and it will show you all the places that Google logged your device’s location. This can be really cool if you go back a few years and then open up these location in Street View so that you can be reminded of those spots during a vacation that you didn’t take photos of.
