It requires drill down now and doesn’t list visits on the location itself which is a huge negative.
Comment on Google killed Maps Timeline, so I self-hosted a better one [OnTracks]
lka1988@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Misleading as fuck. The Timeline feature never went away - it’s just device-only.
Lemming6969@lemmy.world 9 months ago
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Yes, technically it’s still on the tiny screen of your phone with a really bad ux to make it go, sure. But you see how ‘went away’ is both true for web and effectively true for phone app? You do see that, right?
lka1988@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Paige@piefed.ca 9 months ago
Thanks for clarifying, I was worried for a second.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 months ago
There’s a good chunk of us who used it with the web, and they’re adding that to the vast Google graveyard. That in and of itself makes me excited to see an alternative because Google will kill the app version on a whim too.
lka1988@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
It never went away. It’s still a feature. It’s just stored locally on your device. Thats it.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The device only was for privacy. When the data was stored in the cloud, the government had unrestricted access. By making it device only they need to get your device to get that data.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 9 months ago
Privacy? I’m sure that Google tried so hard to monetize it and after so many years they didn’t found a way, couldn’t use it for ai training too, so they decided to turn it off and save millions in database costs.
They still exfiltrate user movements for improving Google maps, it’s just that they don’t need to keep them indefinitely or for years or maintain a nice interface for that
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m sure Google does monetize the gps data instantly, then throws it away rather than save old data that only costs money to respond to government requests.
This is a case where privacy is economically beneficial to Google.
3abas@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Yes, that’s correct, Google didn’t do it out of the goodness of their non-existent heart, they made what they think is the best financial decision.
It’s a good one for the consumer though, whether see that or not. It’s good that your every move ever taken is stored in a company’s database.
Don’t worry, they most certainly used it to train a decent model of any typical American demographics movements before scrubbing it.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Lol. The only thing this setting does is hide the information from the user. Google, or a thousand other data brokers (many probably created by Google for this purpose) still retain that data indefinitely.
cole@lemdro.id 9 months ago
categorically false. literally do a little bit of research. it is stored on-device entirely now, and Google has no access to it.
jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
What does device-only mean in this context? That it’s only stored on your phone?
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
What else could that possibly mean?
dan@upvote.au 9 months ago
Because of various privacy legislation, and people not wanting Google to track them as much, they stopped syncing the data to Google servers. It’s entirely local now. You can enable encrypted backups and back up the data, however you can really only have the data on one device now, and the web version is gone.
gazter@aussie.zone 9 months ago
It’s no longer accessible from a desktop, only from the Google Maps app.
turmacar@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Google also accidentally deleted a random amount of user’s timeline data if you didn’t immediately catch it and restore from back up last March before the affected backups were overwritten. If you didn’t keep a close enough watch on your timeline to know that that happened, everything before ~Feb 2025 is gone now.
Ask me how I know. Yes I kept up on permissions. Yes I had backups on. No I didn’t have a new device. I even have dozens of available gigabytes of paid storage on Google One.
I’m sure it will only get more stable due to maps and timeline being revenue generators that encourage investment.
z0n@feddit.org 9 months ago
I recorded data since 2013. I loved checking out previous vacation trip locations or just randomly browsing through where I’ve been. All gone now.
Did everything Google recommended but they just deleted it and there’s no way to get it back.
I really wish I would’ve made an offline backup or something before.
turmacar@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Same, been kicking myself since I found out it was all gone a few weeks ago. Don’t know why I didn’t make a ‘just in case’ backup / export.
Still infuriating they can just go “oops all gone”. It came through the roll-out fine, I remember looking stuff up in February. As far as I can tell it was a later unrelated glitch.