Wherever you go, there you are

September 21, 2017 10:59 PM

Location History Visualizer does what it says on the box, using Google location history json files. So if you have an Android device, and location tracking switched on (or have ever had this) you can view your own movements around the world over time as a heat map.

The visualiser is open source, and built on Leaflet).

(Warning, it does require you to enter an email address before it will display the final visualisation. But it doesn't require you to click on any confirmation email or anything like that, so whether you give your actual email is entirely up to you.)

posted by lollusc (21 comments total)

I just tried it and I feel like either Google is terrible at collecting my location history, I turned off location collection years and years ago and forgot about it, or they gave me location data from someone else that has lived in an area I once did but has completely different habits from me.

This is pretty cool, but I am perplexed by the output.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:51 PM on September 21, 2017

See also this visualization, which wasn't done with this tool but is very beautifully done. And also comes from Google Location data. There's also Google's own Timeline product.

I'm impressed with how detailed the Android location data is. I've not been able to get anywhere near this kind of data out of an iPhone unless I run high fidelity tracking that sucks 10% of battery an hour. I've been playing around with this stuff for years, running OpenPaths as a low-fidelity iOS tracker. Sadly that product is now dead so I'm using OwnTracks which is, um, not very user friendly. But it records data well on an iPhone and I wanted to do my own code anyway.
posted by Nelson at 12:07 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is so disappointing. I thought it would give you the history of a given location. That would be cool.
posted by Laotic at 12:30 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of Fog of World (minus the Google surveillance).
posted by fairmettle at 12:33 AM on September 22, 2017

I've lived abroad since 2008. I spent a few years in Saudi Arabia with a couple of Android devices, one of which was stolen. I'm pretty sure I'm viewing its fate. And where I primarily worked and traveled (Lebanon/Jordan/Syria) are missing altogether. Maybe those records have been confiscated ;)

And like another poster, a dated history option is desirable.

I recall a Flickr mapping of uploaded locations showing more tourist-y areas versus the roads less traveled.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:47 AM on September 22, 2017

If you screen out the tourists -

Guardian: Want a more 'authentic' tourist experience? There's an app for that

Computer scientists at ITMO University in St Petersburg say they have developed a way of using Instagram to “create a ‘locals’ guide’ ... that is as genuine as it gets”. They analyse residents’ posts on the photo-sharing app to identify the city’s hidden gems, then share them with tourists.

posted by sebastienbailard at 12:55 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is so disappointing. I thought it would give you the history of a given location. That would be cool.

On this spot, September 22, 2017, Laotic found a penny (face up). Nothing much happened before that for five years, but on May 12, 2012, a pigeon pooped here.

Maybe I need to zoom out a bit.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:08 AM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

This really reminds me of 17776 and the places never walked, although then you would need everyone's history and not just your own.
posted by nat at 1:28 AM on September 22, 2017

I just tried it and I feel like either Google is terrible at collecting my location history, I turned off location collection years and years ago and forgot about it, or they gave me location data from someone else that has lived in an area I once did but has completely different habits from me.

That's interesting! It seemed completely accurate for me. I was even able to look at places I'd been on holiday several years ago and see which landmarks in those cities I'd spent the most time at. As for my local patterns, it gave a pretty good representation of the bus and train routes between home, work, and the places I tend to go in the weekends.
posted by lollusc at 1:58 AM on September 22, 2017

It only showed the town I grew up in (where my parents still live), and I have only been there a couple times in the past decade. I must have had location history on during one of those trips and turned it off immediately afterwards.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:18 AM on September 22, 2017

perhaps the most interesting part of this for me is that apparently I forgot to turn on flight mode when flying over the western united states once. or i materialized very briefly 4 miles outside grinnell kansas before returning to my correct space-time coordinates.
posted by logicpunk at 2:23 AM on September 22, 2017

It worked well for me: I had Android phones over a about a six-year period, although evidently can't have had location tracking switched on at first, or the visualisation would have had some more hot-spots. It's slightly disheartening to see how constrained to a relatively small number of locales my movements were.
posted by misteraitch at 2:24 AM on September 22, 2017

Just did mine, and it's a little unnerving to see. The whole of last year's job hunt looks like veins running through the country to the places I interviewed.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:32 AM on September 22, 2017

I didn't do mine. It's too early in the day to look at something that depressing.
posted by elizilla at 5:25 AM on September 22, 2017

Even knowing this comes from actual data, it's crazy how accurate a picture of my life this is. There's a hot spot where my in-laws live in Providence, and another little one south of that in Warwick where the airport is. It also tracks pretty much all of our vacations. There's a hot spot in Lisbon, but only over the hotel we stayed in, a hot spot in New Hampshire where we rent a cabin, that can use to pinpoint which half of the camp the cabin is in.

There are some things that look like slight mistakes, but they're dwarfed by the number of places where it's like, yep, that's the Michaels we go to.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 5:31 AM on September 22, 2017

My wife and I were recently marveling at the fidelity and sheer quantity of location data Google has about us. We were looking up a bar to go to and her phone told her "You were last here 16 months ago." Thinking back, she remembered that she had been there for a bachelorette party... and then tapped on that "last here" statement on her phone. It brought up a map of her whole evening from 16 months ago, showing her when she got picked up from our home and all the stops they made that night. Pretty amazing/terrifying.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:25 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

As intrusive as it may seem, I love location tracking. It's a lifesaver when I try to write about a visit a few weeks after, and I can't remember precisely when I went to the restaurant, etc.

This visualization is another reason I like location tracking -- I can tell so many stories with a map.
posted by batter_my_heart at 6:28 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

If it was optional, great, but - how would we know? Google tracks me through my nearby wifi networks whether I'm using android or not, and that's straight up wrong.
posted by petebest at 7:33 AM on September 22, 2017

Yeah, it's creepy, but it's also kind of cool. I'm even getting heat maps from backpacking trips where I had no cell service and put my phone on airplane mode. It makes me wish I could get the heatmap on a topo or satellite background too, so I can see what kind of topography I tend to camp and rest in. Granted, I know the answer to that is "anything with shade" (the area I'm looking at right now is the desert), but still.
posted by natabat at 10:05 AM on September 22, 2017

I have apparently spent a lot of time at the local Renaissance Festival. [real]
posted by hanov3r at 12:42 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is so disappointing. I thought it would give you the history of a given location. That would be cool.

Other people have said it indirectly already, but Google Maps on Android already does that. If you tap on a place it thinks/knows you went, it will tell you the last few times you were there. There's all kinds of other crazy shit they have on you, which you can view and otherwise manage from the privacy dashboard or whatever they call it these days.

Oh what a subpoena could learn about (most) any of us.
posted by wierdo at 10:05 PM on September 22, 2017