Want to know where you have been? Google knows.

[armadillo]

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

 

You must be logged into you Gmail account, and then click on calendar. Google can still track you if you have your GPS and Wi-Fi settings turned off.

 

Scary, because Apple probably does the same.

[corndog]

I'm surprised to say that they have no location history for me, and I'm a fairly heavy google user.

[rvwnsd]

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

 

You must be logged into you Gmail account, and then click on calendar. Google can still track you if you have your GPS and Wi-Fi settings turned off.

 

Scary, because Apple probably does the same.

 

Cell phone providers have been doing this for years. How else do you think they can route calls to your mobile phone? They just don't give you the ability to see the data on their web sites.

[jgoo]

I'm surprised to say that they have no location history for me, and I'm a fairly heavy google user.

 

There is no location history for me either. It seems as though to have a location history you have to enable that under your account using the Account History tab, then select "Enable" for Places You've Been (at least that is the process on Chrome).

[bigvalboy]

There is no location history for me either. It seems as though to have a location history you have to enable that under your account using the Account History tab, then select "Enable" for Places You've Been (at least that is the process on Chrome).

 

Thnaks Jgoo, Interesting, I fooled around with it last night and couldn't quit figure out how to view, but rvwnsd is correct about cell phone companies.

[+ quoththeraven]

There is no location history for me either. It seems as though to have a location history you have to enable that under your account using the Account History tab, then select "Enable" for Places You've Been (at least that is the process on Chrome).

 

Ditto ditto ditto. Gmail is my primary account, although I still maintain an e-mail account with my ISP that uses my real name that is connected with Windows Live, Microsoft Outlook, and a Hotmail account; I use my YouTube account a lot to save videos (mostly under a different pseudonym than my gmail account); I use Google maps/streetview (and sometimes Google Earth) exclusively; and because of my dissatisfaction with Firefox, Chrome is my default browser. Yet Google has no location history for me whatsoever. The fact that the only online calendar I maintain is through the interface between my ISP account, Hotmail, and Windows Live probably has something to do with it. (I loathe the way Gmail displays and infinitely prefer Microsoft Outlook's preview window and the like.)

 

This goes along with my contention in the thread about the Great Naked Photo Reveal that we haven't lost as much privacy as people think. The same thing came up when LiveJournal enabled crossposting to Facebook and Twitter; users were all up in arms about someone being able to make friends-locked threads public by cross-posting comments made in such threads. LiveJournal backed off on that (and I was never convinced the technology was set up to do that; it shouldn't have been possible to undo friends-locking of threads even with a cross-post, which at most should only disclose the cross-poster's comment, although I can see where in some situations even that might be problematic), and the people who were the most vociferous about it completely overlooked the fact that if they didn't give LiveJournal information on their Facebook or Twitter accounts, LiveJournal wouldn't be able to associate the accounts in order to do any cross-posts. In other words, whether cross-posts happened was entirely up to the user and couldn't just happen by accident as many opponents seemed to assume they could.

 

Nevertheless, some of my LiveJournal friends left for Dreamwidth (and some have now deleted or abandoned their LiveJournal accounts) in what I view as a symbolic protest over a privacy violation that didn't in fact occur while at the same time shunning, shaming, and criticizing those of us who stayed as insufficiently concerned about their privacy (not ours, theirs). With friends like that ... you know the drill.

 

My LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, and, to the extent possible, other pseudonymous internet accounts are set up to minimize the likelihood that any publicly available (as opposed to friends-locked) content will appear in an internet search. I lock pretty much anything with any type of reasonably identifiable personal information and make sure my tweets/retweets/replies, Tumblr reblogs, and public profiles are not personally revealing. I not only expect privacy but think that I'm pretty much off the radar to anyone who doesn't know me, doesn't follow my Twitter or Tumblr accounts (with, as I said, fairly innocuous non-personally revealing content other than as to which celebrities and TV shows I'm a fan of), and doesn't read my (pseudonymous) fanfiction. I have no naked photos to be stored in the cloud, let alone anywhere else; my cloud content consists of (a) Word documents I've sent via the G-mail account under my main (fannish) pseudonym, and that only if they automatically went into gDocs as well; and (b) music in my Amazon account under the older hyphenated version of my real name. If some hypothetical hacker wants to root around in those, they're welcome to do so.