If you have an Android phone you may or may not be aware that Google may be keeping years of your location history. There is a setting in the phone to enable or disable this feature. If you want to change this setting you need to open your Google maps app on your phone and click on the account button in the upper right. This is a small circle with either a photo or solid color. Then there should be a selection to switch the location history setting. This may vary based on different software versions.
Currently, this data is stored both on the phone and on Google servers. However, I just received an email today basically saying if you want to save your location history you need update your settings otherwise your data will be deleted. If I read between the lines here it looks to me like Google doesn't want to store your location information anymore on their servers. This makes perfect sense as they have a large liability here in terms of privacy.
So thats good news for privacy advocates and not so good news for law enforcement. This takes one of their tools away of determining phone locations. The location may still be on the device and they can extract the data from the device but that comes with its own set of obstacles.
If you want to keep your location history then make the settings change in the maps app on your phone before May 14, 2025.
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