Google Has Tons of Data on You — Use It for Your Own Purposes

  • I know where you went last summr

Google has your data — Now you can use it for your own purposes

Google 2015-07-15 13_47_42Do you have your smartphone’s location features enabled? Likely you’re aware there’s a huge pile of data accumulating about your life, via your smartphone and your web activities. Well, yesterday Google stepped up with a cool new feature — Google Timeline — to let you personally use some of the enormous amount of data you’ve kindly let the company collect about you. Timeline lets you view all the places you’ve been on any given day, month or year.

By the way, ever wondered just how much data Google is collecting? It’s been estimated that in all, Google may be storing 10-15 exabytes of data (an exabyte equals 1 million terabytes). At least you can say now they’re not keeping it all for themselves!

No doubt Timeline is fascinating, and it may even be useful. It lets you see track where you’ve been both visually on a map, and on a text and icon list. Everywhere you’ve been.

Will Timeline be useful to me?

How is that useful?

Well, now you’ll realize how many times you’ve eaten at that same boring lunch spot, and maybe that’ll spur you to try something more adventurous, right?

It can also help you remember the name of the hotel you stayed at two years ago for your anniversary. Or that one amazing dive bar in Manhattan so you can find it again next time you visit. Where exactly was that campground in Big Sur you want to recommend to your cousin? (Note, you’ll have to remember what date you visited any of these places, if you want Timeline to help you find it.)

If you’re working on improving your health, it makes it easy to check whether your habits are keeping up with your intention — how many times last month did you really hit the gym? How often does your weekend bike ride really exceed a couple of miles?

So many apps, so much data

Google’s not the first app-maker to let users see their location data. For example, Apple iPhone lets you see your frequent locations under its Settings, and exercise apps like RunKepper and Map My Run keep visual records mapping exactly where and how far you’ve walked, jogged or run. But Google Timeline may be unique in collecting and showing everywhere you’ve been.

Of course some people will find it creepy or even alarming Google has all this data. But the company says the data is only available to you and your apps. And, Google has made a point recently to tell its customers about all this data and make it easier to control what’s done with it.

Do you want to opt out?

But if you want to, it’s easy to disable the features that allow all this data collection in the first place.

Your own personal Timeline is easy to disable — just go to your Timeline page, and click “Pause” on Location History in the lower left corner. If you’ve already kept your location history turned off, Google won’t have any locations saved in your Timeline at all.

That’s worth considering, if you want to keep your locations and activities private (either from Google, or from other people in your life). But it might not be nearly as fun.

I’m personally a privacy-minded citizen, but I admit I enjoyed looking through my own Timeline, and I may keep some or all of these capabilities active for a while — as I haven’t yet seen evidence anyone’s using the data nefariously — just to explore the benefits.

 

2017-01-24T16:21:52+00:00

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