Summary
- Google started sending out emails with personalized Maps’ “2024 Timeline update” to its users starting last week.
- These summaries use data from your location history to present to you interesting anecdotes about your journeys in the past year.
- Going forward, Google Maps’ Timeline feature will become device-specific, improving privacy by moving data offline.
As the year wraps up, we’ve started to eagerly wait for recaps from apps like Spotify and YouTube Music, rather than the usual holiday festivities. Spotify popularized this trend, and other services, including Google Maps, quickly followed suit. Google Maps has been putting the location data it already collects to good use for the past few years. Now, like clockwork, the 2024 Timeline update is available for everyone to revisit their travel memories before planning their 2025 adventures.
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Since last week, Google has been sending out emails with personalized annual travel summaries to users with interesting anecdotes. For example, it reveals how much time you spent traveling and the distance you covered, even comparing it to the Earth’s circumference. You might also find some data that reminds you of your broken New Year resolutions, like the hours spent shopping or dining out when you vowed to shop less and cook at home more.
Thankfully, the recap makes up for that by including some nice photos (pulled from the web, not your personal albums) of cities and countries you visited. The map view, on the other hand, marks these locations with dots to show your journeys, offering a visual overview of how far you traveled from home (shown below). While all of this data is presented in the email itself, you can tap the Explore Timeline button to reminisce about your trips in the Google Maps app.
Google Maps’ Timeline is changing later this year
Google Maps’ Timeline feature uses your location history from all your Android handsets (and even iPhones) to keep a log of your travels. Previously, Google saved this data to the cloud, making it accessible across devices. For better privacy, Google is moving this data entirely offline by default, which means your timeline will now be device-specific, though you can opt to back it up for longer periods. If you’ve set your timeline data to auto-delete, say every three months, your 2024 Timeline update will only include recent data.
With cloud syncing disabled, Timeline soon won’t be available on Google Maps for the web. It will stop appearing exactly six months after you receive the email intimation — for a lot of us on the Android Police team, for instance, that date is June 9, 2025, though it may vary for you.