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Tech

Google Released a Throwback Feature for Every Place You've Visited

But only if you agreed to tell.
Screenshot by Clinton Nguyen

If you've opted in to Google's location history, it might have dawned on you that it knows exactly where you've been at any given point of the day. And as weird and occasionally awkward as that is, the company's made all those data points into scrapbooking material.

Google announced in a blog post that it's rolling out a Timeline feature for Google Maps, which will comb over all the locations you've sent and present it in a clean, navigable page. It has yet to roll out on the iOS version of the app, but it's now available on Android and web browsers.

It's fairly similar to Timehop, another popular app for zooming back to embarrassing status updates you made years ago. But unlike Timehop, Timeline does a fair bit more with the data you supply it: you can check where your most frequent haunts are (for me, it's home and hostels where I've stayed for a couple days) and see when you've made any trips outside of town. You can see places you've visited on exact days since the moment you've turned location tracking on and it'll graph exactly how many places you've stopped by in one day.

The feature also aggregates any geotagged photos you've amassed, creating a sort of automatic scrapbook, which could come in handy if you're a traveler that's intent on documenting all the places you've been to.

Timeline will only look as impressive or as disturbing as the amount of data you've given the company, which might assuage some of the privacy-conscious folks out there. None of the information is publicly viewable, i.e., you're only really in trouble if someone gains access to your Google account. But in case you're seeing more than what you're comfortable with, the company built a privacy checkup tool to make sure you're only giving them what you want.

In any case, if you're into self-stalking and throwbacks, looking at your Maps timeline is probably less cringe-inducing than scrolling back a couple years on your Instagram profile or seeing what your first few Facebook posts were like. Aside from the nostalgia factor, it might even be, you know, useful.