I received an email recently from Google kindly telling me where I had been in 2019. My initial thought was, thanks Google, but I kind of know where I have been, even though my memory may not be what it was, I think I can remember where I’ve been. But then I looked at it and it’s actually pretty cool. To see it laid out in front of you, I was like, “Actually I did do a lot last year, and apparently I travelled around the world once!”.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, it is a feature of Google Map’s location service.
According to Google, I went to six countries, 37 cities and 110 places! When I looked into the details, it was listing the airport as a place, and also places near where I live got counted. So it literally does keep track of everywhere you go. If you want a more accurate view of your travels only, then you can turn it off when at home, and remember to turn it on when you travel.
So how accurate is this? According to my memory, these are the countries and cities / towns I travelled to.
- United States
- Sweden
- Spain (I live here but travelling here still counts!)
- Portugal
- Italy
- Germany
- England
- Fort Lauderdale
- Sunrise
- New York
- Las Vegas (not new)
- Stockholm
- Seville
- Lisbon
- Portimao
- Sintra
- Sant Agnello
- Sorrento
- Amalfi
- Ravello
- Positano
- Naples
- Ischia
- Procida
- Cologne
- Dusseldorf
- and last but not least Eastbourne!!
So I make that twenty places, not 37, but it does count things like the new shopping center I went to, the overnight stay I had near the airport and so on. I kept location history on all the time so that is why it did that. I didn’t even think about turning it off to be honest. I will just leave it on all the time, it’s still nice to get a good idea of your travels. So remember, if you want it to be more accurate then you will have to turn it off when you are not travelling.
It got the country count spot on – I went to four new countries. I’m counting Spain as a travel country too as I went to Seville, but it clearly does not count your home country in its stats.
I’m not going to go into the places – one hundred and ten! Yeah, so I don’t need to recap the time I went to the toilet in the bar around the corner.
Pretty cool feature though. Have you had yours? If you are a Google user and want to know how to turn it on you can do it in two ways. One is via the Google Maps application – go into your timeline and find the location history setting. Or you can do it from a computer when signed into your Google account.
Here are more details from Google – “Manage Your Location History”.
