Google Maps now shows where you have been

There’s maybe a handful of people that know all your whereabouts. Maybe it’s your spouse or your kid, if you regularly talk about your schedules. Oh and there’s Google — depending on how much you rely on its services like Maps and its digital assistant Google Now.

Google, this week, announced a feature called Your Timeline that shows you everywhere you’ve been on a map, tracking it by time and date. The company is rolling out the feature gradually, first on the Web and for phones running Google’s Android operating system. It said the new feature is useful for remembering the places you’ve been, like a fun bar you visited or the road trips you’ve taken.

“Your Timeline allows you to visualise your real-world routines,” Gerard Sanz, a Google project manager, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. But the feature is also a reminder of how much data Google collects on its users. The company lives on knowing personal information about the people who use its services — like where they’ve been or what they’ve searched for online. Privacy advocates have criticised the company for already knowing too much about its users.

Google is quick to point to privacy controls for the feature. A user can delete anything from their timeline, including a day’s worth of location data, as well as the entire timeline itself. People can also edit and personalise names of places on the map (like Mom’s house), or turn off location tracking services altogether.