Personal Google Location History

Do you know where you have been? Google does. That is if you have your location history turned on. I personally love this feature, it means if you forget your phone somewhere you can log in to any computer and map the phone location, and even lock or erase the phone contents remotely.

I have been thinking about mapping my own personal history for some time, so I finally took a few minutes to download the past seven months of life, since I moved to Toronto. The files are extracted as monthly KML files from my personalized Location History portal. I then merged these into a single file in ArcMap. Because the track lines are fairly random at times, I transformed the vertices into points representing the exact locations where Google actually called home. This represented about 150,000 points (21,000 points per month or 700 points a day). I think this is a pretty awesome sample size, though it is not truly random since places I play with my phone are over represented, places my phone is turned off or underground are excluded, and places I run are excluded since I don't carry my phone. Here are all the raw data points and path lines for reference:



I also calculated a kernel density surface of the points to better represent the areas with many overlapping points. This map is below:



UPDATE: Here is another set of maps I created with one full year of location history data from Vancouver:





I would be happy to make a map of YOUR location history for a small fee if you are interested - all I need is a copy of your Google Takeout file in KML format that you can download from here. Please let me know if you have any questions in a comment below. I think it would be radical if I could automate this process and build an app so people could create their own custom history maps with the touch of a button - get in touch if you have any ideas about this!