Visualizing Your Location History with Google Timeline
You have a few options for visualizing your location history. The first, and simplest, is Google’s very own Timeline tool, which you can access by signing in at Google Timeline and seeing a map with dots that show you every place Google logged your coordinates. It’s nice because it just takes a few clicks, it tells you about trips you’ve taken, and gives you a few tools to see all your movements over time. Its more minimalist visualizations lack the easy visual impact of a heatmap, though. The dots don’t even change size or color depending on how often you’ve visited a place. That’s why the Location History Visualizer tool is really where you should look if you really want to understand your habits and get a feel for what can be done with your location data. It shows you everywhere you’ve been, down to what streets you walked on to get there, and color-codes the places by how often they appear in your data. It’s a little more complicated to generate, but it’s worth it. If you’re worried about your data (and at this point, you might be) the site is private and secure. All the processing is done locally, so your data will never leave your computer.
1. Export Your Location History With Google Takeout
This is your one-stop shop for all your Google data, and that’s where your location visualization journey also begins. Here’s how you can export it using the tool.
2. Import the Data to Location History Visualizer
There are a few sites that let you visualize your Google location history, and you can even do it yourself with tools like Tableau, but Location History Visualizer is probably still the best. Here, we’ll be using the free version of Location History Visualizer, though they also have a paid pro version that allows you to get extremely detailed with your location data.
How To Disable Google Location History
You can easily disable your account’s Google Location History using your desktop or mobile device at any time, if you don’t want Google tracking your movements. To turn it off, simply follow the steps below.
Disable Google Location History on Desktop
Note that all your previous activity won’t be deleted once you turn off your Location History settings. You’ll have to manually delete them if you wish.
Disable Google Location History Using Mobile Device
1. How accurate is Google Timeline?
If you’re going through some of your previous locations in Google Timeline and find some places that you don’t remember visiting, don’t panic. The feature certainly isn’t 100% accurate. In fact, it gets a lot of your location data wrong quite often and works mostly through approximation. If you want to, you can even go back to previous locations on your timeline and edit them so they’re more accurate.
2. Can anyone else see my timeline?
According to Google, no one else but you can see their own timeline. However, it’s a different story if someone else gains access to your Google account or you leave it logged in on a shared computer. In cases like the latter, Google Timeline would automatically pull up the location history of the Google account currently accessed in the web browser.
3. What else can I do with Google Takeout?
Google Takeout gives you access to virtually every scrap of information that’s related to your Google account, from your YouTube search history and posted comments to your Gmail messages and Google Drive files. You can even pull up data about your Google Play Store app installations. It’s an amazing tool for backing up very specific content from your Google account or for migrating the information to another platform.
