The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History. If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn Location History on (it’s off by default), soon your Timeline will be saved right on your device — giving you even more control over your data. Just like before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time or disable the setting entirely.
If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.
↫ Marlo McGriff, Director of Product, Google Maps, at Google’s official blog
All else being equal, moving location data from residing unencrypted in the cloud to on your device is a good thing. That being said, if Google is giving up access to this data, it most likely means they’ve gotten really good at estimating your whereabouts using other data instead.
> That being said, if Google is giving up access to this data, it most likely means they’ve gotten really good at estimating your whereabouts using other data instead.
and/or that they’re going to be processing the data locally.
With all those “ai” “tensor” cores on modern phones, there is much less need for their servers to be involved, with as a side benefit that they can pretend it is “privacy friendly”.
Yes,
It is a “win-win” situation. Every “Hey Google” API call, or background processing of image to recognize faces has a small but distinct cost. They add up.
So if Google is spending (making this up) one cent per hour per Android phone, it would add up to more than $80/year in cloud costs. Whereas doing this locally means you’d be spending a bit more on electricity costs (most likely much less than that amount).
And… you get to have your data stored securely on device with (hopefully) no leaks.
Why not do it?
It’s highly likely the data simply wasn’t as profitable as earlier thought, like the AI assistants that got massive cuts in January.
This is my thinking. They have the aggregate data, and that is all they need to sell ads to businesses.
Whatever, ad initiative the history was tied to is dead.
So this is after the data has been sent to Google servers?
Allows them to say hey you have to go to the user for that info. They don’t have to have teams of people who provide into for these subpoenas.
The valuable location data comes from other apps and other info not map data.
This allows them to tell law enforcement sorry we don’t have that.