Google Maps introduces dystopian new location history feature called Your Timeline
Depending on your point of view, this is either a dystopian vision of the future or a handy way to retrace your past steps. Either way, Google Maps has just introduced a new feature that lets you look back at your full location history. Which means Google knows everywhere you've been…
The feature, called Your Timeline, allows you to visualise your past routines and check where you’ve been at any given time – provided that you’ve opted in to storing locations with Google.
As Gerard Sanz, product manager at Google, writes on the company’s official blog:
Have you ever wanted a way to easily remember all the places you’ve been — whether it’s a museum you visited during your last vacation or that fun bar you stumbled upon a few months ago?
Your Timeline is private and visible only to you, and Google ensures that you have full control to edit or delete the locations that appear on it. If you don’t want locations to be stored at all, go to “Account history” and turn off “Places you go”.
Is this a genuinely useful tool or more a quirky way of looking back at what you’ve been up to? The jury is still out.