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Google killed Maps Timeline, so I self-hosted a better one [OwnTracks]
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Misleading as fuck. The Timeline feature never went away - it's just device-only.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It never went away. It's still a feature. It's just stored locally on your device. Thats it.
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?
Yeah, super hard to find...
Thanks for clarifying, I was worried for a second.
What does device-only mean in this context? That it's only stored on your phone?
Because of various privacy legislation, and people not wanting Google to track them as much, they stopped syncing the data to Google servers. As someone who's worked at big tech companies, my guess would be that storing so many people's location history was flagged as an issue during a privacy audit.
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.
It's no longer accessible from a desktop, only from the Google Maps app.
What else could that possibly mean?