Google stores your location history for years

By this point it should surprise no one that Google has what might be the best database of personal information in the world. Many users aren’t aware of it, but the geolocation data gathered by Google’s various services through your smartphone are stored in Google Maps’s history for two and a half years, and with it you can check your location at a certain time on a particular weekday. Luckily, you can remove that history (at least the part that you can see here).

To view your location history you’ll need to log in the corresponding section of Google Maps. You don’t even need to have made intensive use of your GPS localization feature, as the WiFi triangulation done by many apps also allows it to generate an approximate location.

If you choose a specific date from the calendar that appears at the left, you can view on the map all the routes you’ve taken as well as the nodes where you’ve spent the most time. But that’s not all: if you click on one of these nodes you can see the time ranges you’ve spend in these places and even see a 24-hour timelapse of your movements on a particular day by clicking on the ‘play’ icon in the lower left corner of the map. It’s actually a bit freaky!

How to erase your history

Luckily, it’s also possible to remove your history using the context options that appear below the calendar, and you can erase either your data from a single day or your entire history. It’s even possible to remove a particular node by clicking on the corresponding option that appears in the bubble over the node when you right-click.

It’s also possible to remove your location history on Android via the Google Settings app. If you have Android 4.4.4, you’ll need to go to Account history > Google location history, while for earlier versions the path will be Location > Location history. From this same menu you can also enable automatic storage of your location data by ticking the Location reports option.