Want to keep your location private? With its latest update, Google has introduced tighter controls to Google Maps service to allow you to clamp down on where your location history is shared.
For the first time, you’ll be able to save your Timeline – an encrypted record of all the places of interest, attractions, shops, or regular spots that you’ve visited – onto your device.
That blocks the detailed history of your movements, hotels and restaurants you've researched, airports you've visited, and directions you've plotted as tracked within Google Maps, from reaching Google’s servers.
If you want to enable the feature, you’ll need to turn on your Location History in order to activate Timeline. By default, Timeline is disabled within the app.
Google has made it much easier to unearth settings related to your location. If you’re running the latest version of Google Maps, you can click on your blue dot on the map to immediately launch the settings panel with Location History and Timeline. It’s a real timesaver.
Google Maps will soon allow iPhone and Android users to store their location data on-device, blocking any record of their movements or searches from an upload to Google's servers
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From there, you can choose how much of your location data is shared with and stored in the cloud without digging too deeply into the settings.
You can also delete a specific location from your history. For example, if you were searching for a restaurant to take your partner as a surprise, you can now wipe it from your records. Turn-by-turn directions, searches within Google Maps, and shares to other apps will be deleted, Google says.
Even if you decide not to save your location data exclusively on your handset, Google has dramatically reduced the amount of time that information will be stored on its servers. Until now, the default duration before data is automatically deleted was 18-months.
But with the latest update, Google has dropped that timeframe down to just three months. Of course, you can delete location data whenever you want, whether that’s a specific location or the entire timeline of your travels, or turn-off auto-delete to keep your records around for longer.
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The ability to tap on the blue dot to instantly load-up your location settings will be rolling out to Android and iOS users in the coming weeks, Google says. However, the ability to save your Timeline directly to the internal storage on your smartphone won’t arrive until next year.
