Google Timeline

If you use a smart phone with Google services, which every Android phone does, your location data is being tracked.

Good for me to use for blogging, so I don't have to break my head trying to remember what and when I did stuff.

If you opt out of it, probably what happens is Google looks at it anyway without telling you and then the government stores it its NSA database. But then you don't get a saved copy for yourself to look at.

If you turn location history on, Google periodically reports where you were at what time, how fast you were going and which direction you were heading. A stylized picture taken at one location showed up on the timeline as well.

All my data since December, 2015 is only about 50 mb. It's a simple text file in .json format.

The phone guesses what type of movement you are engaged based on your speed.

Algorithms can filter this data to extract almost everything about your activities.

A user is likely to be at home at night. We filter out the
user's points which occur at night and cluster them. The largest
cluster is deemed the user's home location.

Similarly, work location is derived by clustering points which
occur on weekdays in the middle of the day and clustering them.

Given a source and destination location (e.g. home and work), we
extract the points from the user's location history which likely
occurred on the user's driving commute from source to destination

- Extracting Patterns from Location History.

It pretty much knows where you work, where you live, what time you leave your house in the morning, what time you get to work and get off work, which route you take, what grocery stores etc you visit on the way home, what time you get home. Enough information to stage The Truman Show (1998).

You could probably also write an algorithm to estimate what time a person goes to sleep, by tracking phone battery usage. Note the times that app usage, battery usage drops and when the phone gets plugged in. This is less reliable, because a person might charge their phone as soon as they get home and not use it until the next morning... but you'd know what time they got home from their commute so... you could kinda tell that too.

If you have everyone's phone tracked, you could also discover who is having an affair with who. You'd know who lives in a house together, and could detect a lover frequenting the house when other family members are away or notice irregular activities like slipping away from work to a hotel etc.

The juiciest stuff is probably the classified secret part of Google, Inc. that are not shown to civilian guinea pigs. I mean, come on, do you really believe that all this technology is funded by 'commercial advertising' for Hush Puppy trying to sell you a Christmas slipper?

If I were in the CIA, I'd be much more interested to find which cave Bin Laden lived in and who he associated with. But I think they already knew, 'cause it doesn't take that long to find the most wanted man on the planet. More likely this technology is being tested internally on civilians to see if they can out Russian and Chinese double agents trading national security secrets.