Google Maps location history change rolling out, Your Timeline on web going away

Back in December, Google announced that Maps Location History would soon be stored on your phone instead of the cloud. This change to the Google Maps Timeline is continuing to roll out, and will see the deprecation of Your Timeline on the web.

When that location data was stored in Google’s servers, it was subject to broad geofence warrants that allowed law enforcement to request all information about devices near a particular incident. With this change, Google no longer has the ability to respond to those requests.

As part of this change, Location History is now called “Timeline.” That information has long been used by the popular “Your Timeline” feature that shows where you’ve been, including the specific locations you might have visited. This data is grouped into Trips, Places, Cities, and World (countries), while Google also generates Insights, like how far you traveled on a particular mode of transport. 

The Your Timeline feature will continue to work in Google Maps for Android and iOS. However, this new on-device storage model means “Timeline for Web Maps will be going away.” 

Since the data shown on your Timeline comes directly from your device, Timeline won’t be available on Maps on your computer after your data is moved to your phone

Some people are quite upset about the loss of google.com/maps/timeline, which hasn’t been visually updated in ages, as they used the web UI heavily.

You will receive an email and app notifications once this change is available on your account. Google has been slowly rolling it out in recent months and it’s still not yet widely available. The company warns how:

If you don’t update your settings by the deadline in the emails and notifications you receive, you may lose some or all of your Timeline data, like your visits and routes.

Once enabled, you will have the option to “automatically back up your Timeline if you need to switch devices.” This involves an end-to-end encrypted copy of your data being stored on Google’s servers that only you can access.

From there, you can “move an existing backup to a different device or import your Timeline on a new device.”

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