Google made another one if their little annoying and breaking changes (as they do). They’ve basically killed maps timelines, at least as they used to be. They tricked me into signing up for it. I know a lot of people don’t like timeline, but I really do. Firstly it’s the only tool I have to make sense of some of the moves I’ve made over time and is the only real record I keep of the places I visit, secondly I export the timeline data onto a heatmap that shows me where I still haven’t been yet.

They have this “encrypted backup” thing now, but even submitting a takeout request doesn’t give me the actual timeline. And of course this “local” timeline is hidden amongst all the system files I can’t even access, and is probably in some proprietary garbage encrypted format.

I’m guessing they probably did this to comply with some legal requirement, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I just want to generate my place heatmaps FFS. They’re still using my timeline history for advertising and “personalisation”, the only thing that’s changed is instead of it being stored somewhere else I can access conveniently, it’s stored locally but fucking impossible to reach