Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

A year ago, Google announced plans to save people’s Location History, which it now calls Timeline, locally on devices rather than on its servers.

“This update gives people even more control over their data – and like before, they have the option to save it indefinitely if they want,” a Google spokesperson told The Register.

Privacy advocates hailed the move as a way to address the proliferation of geofence warrants – law enforcement demands seeking location data for everyone within a given area during some period of time.

The privacy afforded by this transition is somewhat overstated, though, because turning Timeline/Location History off doesn’t preclude Google’s collection and storage of data that reveals the user’s location directly or indirectly.

The company explains: “If settings like Web and App Activity are on but you turn off Location History or delete location data from Location History, your Google Account may still save location data as part of your use of other Google sites, apps, and services. This activity can include info about your location from your device’s general area and IP address.”

In addition to no longer storing Timeline data in the cloud by default, Google changed the default retention period – for Timeline/Location History and Web & App Activity, if turned on by the user – to three months, down from 18 months, with the option to disable auto-deletion. And if the user chooses to store a backup of Timeline data for a specific device in the cloud, Google said it will encrypt the data so that only the user will have access.

Yet there has been collateral damage among those caught unprepared by the transition, which has been rolled out gradually over the past year and appears to be ongoing. Different people have received notifications from Google with different deadlines to make a decision about downloading their Timeline data from Google Takeout before it gets deleted.

Despite the advance warning, complaints about missing data abound. And the loss of that data has been difficult for some. Numerous threads on Reddit and in Google’s support forum over the past few months lament the loss of Google Maps location history.

People claim to use Timeline information for various reasons, like calculating taxes or remembering activities with loved ones now gone. Some have come to depend upon it.

“In early 2022, I suffered a brain injury when a flesh-eating bacteria invaded my prefrontal cortex and killed about 5 percent of my brain,” one reader told The Register, asking not to be identified. “I have very limited spatial memory now, and I utilized Google Timeline on the desktop for years to help me figure out where I’ve been three days ago, for the last week, month, etc. Without this, I can’t keep track of my life.”

This individual, whom we’ll call “Sam,” told us that he contacted Google about his concerns in early 2024 but received no reply.

Sam said he found a self-hosted alternative, Dawarich, to store the data, but found it difficult to set up.

“I would have been absolutely destroyed if I had accidentally selected the default option in the Google Timeline migration (or simply not known and done nothing),” he said. “If Google had wiped all but three months of my location storage, it would have fundamentally devastated my attempts to re-remember where I’ve been since 2022, and would have cut a lot of memories out of my life. It is a highly unethical design decision.”

Sam points to the various online accounts about the unexpected loss of this data as an indication that Google’s outreach about the data retention changes has been inadequate.

Before December 8, Sam said, Google Maps on desktop would tell you when you visited a place. Until about five months ago, the app would also show photos from Google Photos. But the photos are gone now, he said. “With my memory problem, I feel like I lost all association with dates prior to 2022 and it’s been quite distressing to me.”

Sam said that hundreds of people appear to be raising the issue through online support channels and that moderators keep shutting the discussions down.

The main problem, he said, is that the default setting trashes the Timeline and as soon as you do the cloud-to-device migration, even if you accept the migration, it destroys your previous backups of records.json, which contains all the lat-long coordinates.

The Google Timeline Android Backup is not enabled by default, and should be, he argues, and Timeline data never should have been deleted from Google Takeout.

Whether Google was motivated to make this change out of a newfound respect for privacy or to limit the damage from privacy lawsuits and legal demands for customer location data, the company’s execution of the Timeline data transition and its communication with customers appears to have fallen short.

When the company says, “Your location information is personal. We’re committed to keeping it safe, private, and in your control,” then admits it “may still save location data as part of your use of other Google sites, apps, and services,” that’s sending mixed signals.

While Google may still store location data (or data to derive location) even when Timeline is turned off, some customers who want location data have seen their Timelines vanish. There ought to be a better way. ®

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