I sometimes query this to help me recall details from years ago, so I'm sad that the encroachment of very broad government surveillance and the rise to power of extremist politicians makes it unacceptably dangerous to continue to provide the service.
It was priceless when filling my naturalisation application, which required me to write the exact dates of every international trip I did in the past 5 years.
Also, it's great for trying to fit loose memories in dates and locations.
wouldnt your passport have that information as opposed to relying on third party information? so....... how would the government in this case "verify" your exact dates?
Many countries don't stamp your passport anymore, many that do don't put a date, and even if I relied on that information stamps are messy, out of order, and fading.
The government probably has a list of international flights I've taken somewhere. I honestly don't think they will use it they probably don't deny citizenships because I missed a couple of trips (unlike, say, not reporting frequent trips to North Korea).
It's still nice to do the right thing and fill up that data to the best of my knowledge.
So many, really. It seems to depend on the agent. I’ve passed through US customs and not gotten stamped.
Israel famously does not. They’ll give you a small slip with your details on it. I was told that an Israeli stamp on your passport would automatically bar you from entry in many Arab states so they came up with another system
Also pretty much anytime I have entered the UK via the global entry lanes I never got stamped.
If they’re applying for a visa or citizenship there’s likely requirements that you must have spent X% per year in the country and not abroad, even if it’s inside the schengen zone (or similar). Asking for the exact dates of your travel outside the country is likely the best way to do that
There’s a threshold, you need to have been physically present in the US for 50% of the days of the year requirements.
For example if you’re applying for citizenship based on the 5 year rule, then you must’ve been physically present for at least 30 months (913 days to be exact) in those 5 years prior to your application.
18 months (548 days) if you’re applying based on the 3 year rule as a spouse of a US citizen.
So 8 days instead of 12 can mean it’s no big deal or it can mean you’re not eligible if those 4 days make or break your required amount of days physically present in the US.
It’s one of those silly things the government already knows but wants you report anyways.
While the US doesn’t do a passport check before leaving via the airport, airlines automatically send over departure information to CBP, that’s how they are able to show this information in the I-94 on the website.
Obviously entry is also recorded.
I suppose it’s a way to make it easier to filter out ineligible people at the beginning of processing applications without having to delve into the records to verify and in part to see if you’re honest.
I wish I could opt out of this change. I've been asking Google to remember my location for more than a decade, and it's an amazing record of where we've been, when. I don't care that the government or Google can see it, it's still super useful. I'd pay to keep it in the cloud.
Hopefully there's some way you'll be able to get it out of your device. Obviously not as ideal as a simple checkbox in Google, but to me making you have to set up some sort of export/sync yourself is an acceptable tradeoff for what the rest of us get from this change. Of course, it's easy for me to say that, because I don't use the feature basically at all ;)
It's not that I just want to export what I have right now (which can already be done), but that the active tracking was a valuable service to me. I hope somebody offers an alternative.
Discovery is subject to oversight. The court signs off on the subpoena and your lawyer gets to argue why it's not valid before it does. No, "because I dislike you" isn't going to fly. But if you're in a legitimate feud with someone and they can make a real case that your location information is important evidence for the court to see, sure.
You can allege anything you want in court and proceed exactly like someone having a "legitimate feud." You might be punished later for making up a bunch of bogus claims, but you still got the information you shouldn't have.
This is especially effective if you're a powerful person or corporation and can find a litigant willing to sacrifice their own assets and/or freedom to pursue a fake lawsuit on your behalf. The justice system is subject to Sybil attacks like any other system.
Again, no, because courts don't as a general rule treat with "bogus" claims. If you try to lie to get a subpoena, the other counsel calls bullshit and the judge agrees. This just isn't a thing. This is another angle of the "Hackers Think The Law is a Computer" disconnect. People don't try to hack the courts like this because they tend to get disbarred if they try.
My personal experience is inconsistent with your broad confidence in the justice system's resilience to abuse, and in fact is one of the main reasons why I retired from active practice as a litigator. I've found that concepts like "bullshit" in civil law have many shades of gray, especially when you're dealing with a genuinely angry client seeking justice.
If your experience is closer to the truth, then maybe the tech industry should retain lawyers to redesign our security systems!
In theory, yes. But we wouldn't even be having this conversation if we had a functioning legal system, government agencies that respected people's rights, and government lawyers that didn't "interpret" constitutional protections out of existence behind closed doors.
I believe you that you feel that way. Your phrasing however is awfully close to a "no true scotsman" argument, because you seem to be talking about the USA, which by all means and measures still has a functioning legal system -- despite attacks from all sides, inlcuding major political parties. It produces predictable outcomes according to law and fundamental rights are respected.
According to the World Justice Project [1] the USA is in spot 26 of 150+ examined nations. Worse than most European countries, but far better than most of the world. And while the general "rule of law" trend for the USA is declining for the last decade, checks on government power have actually improved in recent years.
If you don't believe me or WJP numbers, I invite you to travel abroad and spend some time in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Egypt, or even Hungary. If that's too much to ask, just try doing business there. I was involved in projects in some of the above mentioned countries and I tell you, the contrast is startling.
After the end of Roe v Wade, do you really want these nine justices, all of whom iirc said Roe v Wade is the settled law of the land, to decide whether you are a citizen?
Remember that the prosecution says anything no matter how trivial can be used to revoke citizenship.
Does your HN username count as a nickname? Prosecution might say yes. And again this isn't about you or me. It is the same thing as dragnet surveillance. I don't matter but somewhere in our nation or beyond the next MLK or the next great activist will be born and I want them to be able to develop and achieve their goals without being caught up in gotchas.
It is for that person probably not yet born that I don't want a two tiered citizenship system.
Context from the New York Times
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked about the failure to disclose an embarrassing childhood nickname. Justice Elena Kagan said she was a “little bit horrified to know that every time I lie about my weight it has those kinds of consequences.”
Mr. Parker said the law applied to all false statements, even trivial ones.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer said it was “rather surprising that the government of the United States thinks” that the naturalization laws should be “interpreted in a way that would throw into doubt the citizenship of vast percentages of all naturalized citizens.”
Chief Justice Roberts added that the government’s position would give prosecutors extraordinary power. “If you take the position that not answering about the speeding ticket or the nickname is enough to subject that person to denaturalization,” he said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”
No court anywhere is going to get all the way to discovery in a case without representation, that's silly. If you're really in a situation where you're sued by Real Lawyers and refuse to respond like that, what will end up happening is some kind of default judgement. Discovery only happens once people start arguing about stuff.
Though there is a corrolary: occasionally you'll see suits filed against John/Jane Doe defendants. The plaintiff knows they've been wronged and wants justice, but they don't know who the entities are they need to sue for some reason. In those circumstances you can get subpoenas issued to produce e.g. phone logs or security footage, etc... in order to move the case along.
You can turn it off on Android, I did so a few years ago. Although my phone has a perfectly good GPS receiver, Google really dislikes having it turned off and constantly pesters me to turn it back on when using their Map product.
I enable it from the drop down settings menu when I need navigation in Google Maps and in OSMAnd. Google Maps doesn't ask me to turn on Location Services if I'm only looking at a map or to street view.
Location access on device absolutely. The problem here is the Google has been collecting extremely detailed location data, going back years, for nearly all of its users.
And while it’s mildly interesting or useful to some, it’s dangerous to others, especially given it’s stored in a central location out of their control, and running all the time, not just when you’re using Maps.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. Google dislikes having google location services turned off (eg when requesting directions), although the phone has a perfectly good GPS receiver to figure out where it is currently. It's like they don't want to do any lookups unless they're allowed to store the data, so I find myself manually typing in a nearby address as my starting point to get directions.
The annoying thing is that if you disable "automatically track everywhere I go" you lose features like "let me manually provide my home address so I can tap the home button to get directions there". I totally get why that kind of thing gets overlooked, but it's technically unnecessary and also annoying.
Hopefully it can still be downloaded from the device? Then you could just upload the export to a tool and view it, like people do with GDPR exports of other services.
I've already looked into OpenTracks and Locus. Trying to find another app I trust to do this anyway...
You can't find one you trust, Android uses Google's location service to get your location. If you trust Google to uphold your "don't store this", you may be OK.
Have never found myself in and cannot imagine a circumstance where I'd need to know my precise location at a point in time years ago, or really even at any time other than the present.
I travel quite a lot and I routinely look back at my trips from years ago to see what restaurants I visited and where I stayed. It shows me my path on a map and also shows my photos taken at each location which lets me relive my trips easily. It's quite an amazing feature most people don't even know exists.
I just did it the other day to recommend a hole in the wall restaurant in Italy I was last at in 2016. I couldn't even narrow it down to the correct street until I was able to find it on Google timeline.
Need? Probably not. It was certainly handy though knowing the week I was there and what the interior looked like.
I suppose this is a bit of a special case but the US and Canadian governments both require you to provide the full list of trips from the last ten years when applying for citizenship and permanent residency. Timeline is incredibly helpful there.
Could come up with a thousand reasons, but if you want a quick "Fun" reason and a quick "Utilitarian" reason:
Fun: I travel a ton, I love looking at where I went to relive the experience. Especially if it was a recent travel and I'm showing things off to friends asking about it. I just open up the Timeline and say "Okay, well this day we flew in - then we took a 4 hour car ride, then we hung in this town for a few days, then took a boat to this island for some camping, then flew over to this city for a week, and..."
Utilitarian: As a US Citizen living abroad, I apply for the FEIE tax exemption every year to help me keep my first ~$120k as untaxed from the Feds (Should be my entire income, but no - US needs to tax on citizenship and not residency like nearly everyone else.. but I digress). For this rule, I need to have full 24-hour days in foreign territory, so for my documentation to ensure I'm still within my limit, I like pulling up Timeline - snapping a screenshot/export and saving it for later should I ever be audited.
I love location data. In fact when I travel, I bring a GPS logger to track all my locations, it helps me sync up my ok photos and retrace my steps. I have pretty precise maps of ally big trips in the last 10 years.
A GPS logger? What does that do over just your phone? I've been wanting an app to log my location outside of Google but was having trouble picking one to trust
My main concern for having a dedicated GPS logging device is the battery drain of the tracking apps on my phone. Used to have a Transystem 747ProS [1] which uses a Nokia BL-5C battery and would last a few days. However, that device was quite dated even then and its accuracy often lacking.
Now I am carrying a dedicated Android phone with me (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed. The app starts tracking as soon as the phone is moving and saves all the data on device. I used to have an instance of Owntracks [3] running, but now I just run a simple Flask app which pipes the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network when I am home. To visualize the tracks, I import them into QGIS. As the phone is solely used for tracking and only when I take it with me, the battery lasts about three days.
I'm not sure it's what you need but OSMAnd is open source and can record your movements. I use it to record some of my bicycle rides, then I share it to my laptop for a backup, or to whatever share target the app can find.
The plus version is on F-Droid for free. It has unlimited map downloads.
I imagine having that record your movements 24/7 would drain the battery like crazy, though.
If you look at Google Timeline, sometimes the track it records is not particularly accurate, likely because it's only getting updates for significant changes in your location.
I also use OwnTracks to keep track of myself, and there I can see the individual points it gets from the OS notifying it of location changes, and... it's honestly not that great sometimes.
I'm recording one position every 5 seconds when I want to get a GPX track of my ride. If I only wanted a record of my general position I guess I could take 1 position every 5 minutes. However I keep my GPS turned off and I never gave my location history to Google in all these years so I really don't know what the impact would be on battery.
Proofing you were not at a crime scene at a certain time. You disabled location saving - that's suspicious?
/s
More serious, if it would be my data under my control, it can be fun checking the past. Exploring where you travelled and when .. but that is kind of my buisness amd not googles. But since I use a android phone, they have it anyway.
It works handily with Google photos where you can break out an itinerary of an old trip. As with most things, it's for nostalgia so if you're not wired that way, it's not really useful to you. I love reminiscing over old trips and having these details.
Perhaps you’ll stay that way, but it’s pretty common.
For work, I have to produce reports of countries I’ve visited and dates. So looking at location history is pretty handy for remembering if I visited Sweden in 2018 or 2019. Etc etc.
If a feature is being proposed and mandatory, then the existence of one person who doesn't like it is significant.
But if it's already optional, and being removed entirely, then that persons's existence isn't that relevant; what's relevant is the people who DO like it and are losing something for them.
I've used it for estimating driving miles for taxes (cause I suck at tracking it during the ride)
I've also used it for remembering what I was doing on specific days. It's wild how the location movements can accurately prompt my brain for the activities on those days
I was a victim of a car accident. When I was filing the claim with their insurance provider, they wanted the exact location and time of the incident as proof; Timeline has absolutely come in handy for me :)
It's really helpful for remembering that one random restaurant from five years ago in a different state, or retracing our travels through a foreign country so we can better match them with our photos.
Google remembers many places I've totally forgotten about, and it's really nice to be able to revisit the nostalgia when I'm older.
I've been logging this for more than a decade, and it's a lot of fun to go back in time and revisit and rediscover old favorites.
It's one of my favorite features in all of Google :(
I've found it mildly useful for when I say I'll meet up with a friend but I've forgotten their address, so then look at my timeline to see where it is (since I generally remember the last time I saw a friend, if not exactly where their house was).
