In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to write a series about not trusting big corpos with my data. I might have also said that it would be the first and last post in that series because of my laziness
Well, Google has graciously provided me with material for part 2 much sooner than I'd planned.
I just wanted a cool map of Japan
This started with a friend showing me a cute map of Japan that he had made. It colours in the prefectures and cities he's visited, with different levels for places he's stayed overnight, walked around, or just passed through. All generated from his Google Maps Timeline data.
Naturally, I wanted to see mine too. I've had location history turned on since 2013, so I figured this would be pretty straightforward thing: Export data, drop a JSON file into app, get nice map.
Instead, I spent the next hour discovering that more than a decade of my history was missing from Google Maps. And going through the 5 stages of grief associated with that.
The missing data
First I went to Google Takeout, selected Timeline, and downloaded the export. The description even says “Your Timeline data, like settings and locations.” What I got was a settings file and a tiny text file about encrypted backups. No actual location history.
Then I was reminded that it's now all on device for some reason and I needed to export it from my phone. After some confusion, including looking through Maps settings when the export button was actually in Android's location settings, I finally found it.
11k visits and routes saved since 26 December 2024. I've been using this since 2013. Where the fuck was everything else?
I had this panic before
A couple of years ago I had already panicked about this. I'd read the news about Google deleting old Timeline data. Users had to take action to preserve their history. Google was moving Timeline to be stored on device, with an optional encrypted cloud backup. Their announcement described this as giving users “even more control over your data.” or some other corporate nonsense. But it's probably just some political move to pretend that they're not already harvesting all your data anyway.
Now, keeping data on my own device is something I'm generally in favour of. This is a series about data sovereignty after all. But I don't particularly appreciate having to respond to a deadline to stop a company from deleting something I'd already explicitly opted in to.
Anyway, when I saw the news. I went through the settings. I selected the option to not automatically delete my history since I like not having my data unceremoniously deleted. And because I don't trust Google, I also did a Takeout export at the time.
Turns out that last step was crucial to saving my data.
The dates don't even make sense
Everything before the end of 2024 is now missing from my Google Maps Timeline. I checked the backups, and even imported the data from the "Cloud Backup" into my current phone, but the dates made no sense at all.
I bought my Pixel 6 on launch day in 2021. I used it until I got my Pixel 10 in 2025.
So the data going back to December 2024 clearly includes data from my Pixel 6. Some of the old phone's history made it across. This means that if I had any data from the previous phone, it should at least have been backed up from 2021, and not 2024.
From my end, all I can see is that I told Google to keep my history, some of it survived, and a very large chunk of it didn't. It's difficult to have much confidence in a backup system when you have to check what it decided to include.
This became another mini project
Thankfully, I do still have my old exports. They're sitting in a random OneDrive folder (which I am now realising that I should not trust either), in various formats, because the export format changed over the years too.
This would have been the worst thing ever and probably taken me weeks to restore my data but I'm glad I can just throw the data into claude and have it crunch the data into the format I like now.
Separately, I had also already started building my own location tracking app last year because I didn't trust Google to keep Timeline working. Which sounds a bit excessive until something like this happens.
And then they'll wonder why nobody uses it
As someone who follows random tech news, I noticed the warning, changed the setting, exported my data anyway, and had already started building a replacement.
Most people aren't chronically online watching for announcements that a service might delete ten years of their history. They turned the feature on years ago and probably assumed it would keep doing the thing it was supposed to do. I suspect a huge number of them will only discover what's missing if they finally want to look up an old trip, or to check when they last visited a restaurant.
I'm pretty pessimistic about where this is heading. One day, a product manager will look at the usage numbers and notice that barely anyone uses Timeline anymore. Clearly there isn't much demand for the feature (maybe because you deleted all the data making it useful in the first place)
Having the data doesn't give me back my Timeline
The thing that bothers me most, though, is that having those files doesn't give me back what I had in Maps.
Timeline was useful because it's built straight into the maps listing. It even provided a timeline of the times I've visited a place. Now I look back at those dates and it's just emptiness, like I never even existed in the US.
A folder full of json files can't fix that. I can build something to view them, but then I have to maintain that and it still won't be the history attached to the places I'm looking at. It's akin to having all of your photoshop files deleted and only having the jpeg files. This is the part of owning my data that is becoming difficult. Having the data itself isn't useful if you don't also own the software behind it. In fact this is why despite loving how Notion works, I can't/won't use it and instead I've chosen to use Anytype which is open source so it could be maintained if the creators stop supporting it. (Anytype seems to be changing their focus to a different product so that stop supporting part might come sooner rather than later).
I've recently started using immich because I also do not trust Google not to delete my photos. While this is great and they have quite a lot of feature parity with google photos. I unfortunately still use GPhotos to do all my albums and sharing with friends. There's no convenient way to automatically sync the album data over to immich periodically (because google photos will never provide an API obviously). So I'm just waiting for the day that Google decides to ban my account for a mundane reason like not using Gemini enough, and then I'll have to go through another 5 stages of grief.
At least there's a silver lining
Since I can quite easily crunch data and get my 13 years of data into the right format anyway, I at least have the visualisation resulting form all that stress and teeth gnashing.
