Where Have You Been? (Google Knows)

In the four and a half years since I turned on detailed location sharing (as part of using Google Now on my Android handset), Google has sampled my location 740,176 times! That’s about 450 samples per day, about one every 3 minutes.

If you trust Google to keep it private, only use it in aggregate, etc., all that data is very useful for life logging purposes, as I’ll demonstrate briefly here.

If, post-Snowden, you don’t trust them, then turn off location sharing now because there’s no where you’ll go for longer than 3 minutes that they won’t know about, or couldn’t share with a 3rd party.

Mapping It

Having slung all that data through R, I’ll show you, very coarsely, where I’ve been for the last four and a half years.

Where I’ve Been: 11/2012–6/2016

The darker the red, the more time I spent there (with some of the faintest dots and streaks — Dubai, Doha, Minneapolis — being layovers), but you can get more precise than that.

How many days exactly in each country? Here are my top ten:

Want to recall a certain trip you made? The detail on offer might surprise you. Here’s my trip to Bratislava, Slovakia recalled from two summers past with my location plotted in color according to the hour of day:

Bratislava: June 2012

Just looking at this jogs a lot of memories.

Over my 8 days there, you can see a lot of daytime trips (green to pink) from my hotel (top left) and the client site (bottom right). You can also see some nocturnal meanderings (orange to red) around the lovely Old Town (bottom left) where friendly clients took me out to try the national drink, Borovička. (Google probably also has some satellite shots of me buckled over in the cobblestone square with that stuff shooting out my nostrils.)

Graphing Activities

And it’s not just spatial data. Google tries to break samples down for you by inferred activity. Not every sample has this extra data, and, as the confidence values will show you, it’s often not very certain what exactly you’re up to.

Here’s my activities breakdown for the last 12 months, tallied by hour:

Not surprisingly, I’m mostly on my ass. That’s close to 70% of the hours in a year spent sedentarily (in my defense, that does include sleep). The “tilting” is most likely reading, as I tend to read a lot of books on my phone while lying down in bed with the phone on its side.

I don’t own a car, so there’s a fair amount of me roaming about on foot, though that time still counts for just over 5% of the hours in the year.

The “onBicycle” hours are most likely me on my scooter, or on a Bangkok motorcycle taxi, so I can’t claim any fitness credits there.

You get the idea. You can see there are many ways to slice and dice your data. Want to try it? Some tips follow.

DIY Tips

1. Follow these instructions to download your location data.
2. As mentioned, you’re likely to have location records in the hundreds of thousands to wade through, so I’m not sure Excel will cut it. Give R a whirl for slicing and dicing it. This post will give you some hints on how to get mapping with just a few lines of code.
3. If you’re not feeling quite that handy, there are various automated services, none of which I’ve personally tried, that will generate heatmaps from your data. This article describes one that looks interesting.