Google Maps To Delete Your Location History, Here’s How To Protect It (image-X/darshan)

California, US: Google has been sending its users emails informing them about the deadline with a reminder that their location history will be deleted unless it is saved on their device. Originally known as Location History, Google’s Timeline feature will be going offline on June 9 next year.

Although Google announced the decision last year with the deadline set on December 1, 2024, it decided to extend it to allow users more time to make changes.

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The new feature will allow users to revisit the places they have explored in the past. Similar to Google Photos memories, Timeline is essentially a geographic recap with a logbook of everywhere you travelled.

Instead of the cloud, Timeline will be saved independently on each individual smartphone. Location history older than three months will be automatically deleted unless users take specific action to save it.

In addition to that, only 90 days of data will be transferred to a user’s device after the deadline has elapsed, six months from now. Timeline data will not be accessible on web browsers because the data comes directly from smartphones, said the tech giant.

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How To Save Your Timeline Data?

• To keep the existing Timeline data, users must update their settings.
• Make sure you have the Google Maps app version 11.106 or up and Android 6.0 or up.
• Open the app and click on Explore Timeline.
• Tap Next on the card, alerting of the change.
• Choose how many months worth of Timeline data you want to retain.
• Choose if you want to continue sending user data to Google.
• Tap Done.

Back up your Timeline data if you need to switch devices. When you do so, it saves an encrypted copy of your data on Google’s servers, which can be imported to the new device. Simply import the backup by going to settings if you want to move an existing backup to a different device.