How much your location history reveals
A few years of location history says more than a photo library. Photos capture the moment you took them; location data fills all 24 hours of every day, with no gaps. This tool works with that data, so it is worth being clear about exactly what it is.
What coordinates reveal
The coordinate you sit at every night is home. The one you spend weekday daytimes at is work or school. Those two points alone imply your neighborhood, your commute, and roughly your income. Add repeat-visit patterns and more appears.
- A clinic you visit regularly — depending on the specialty, a health condition.
- A place of worship every weekend — religion.
- Frequent overnight stays at one home — a partner or family.
- A few days in a city you are not usually in — a work trip, a holiday, a funeral, an interview.
Scan one year of someone’s timeline and you can infer a good deal they never said out loud. This is not an exaggeration; it is the baseline of location-data analysis.
The limits of “anonymized”
Strip the name and phone number and the trajectory itself still works as a fingerprint. Research has shown that a handful of time-and-place points is enough to re-identify a person in a large dataset. The pair of home and work is very nearly unique. So “location data with personal details removed” is less safe than it sounds.
How this tool is built
Life Map assumes that risk.
- The file never leaves the browser. When you upload a Timeline file it is parsed and computed locally. The only things that go over the network are web fonts and the country/region boundary files.
- Reverse geocoding is offline too. Normally you send coordinates to a maps API to ask “where is this”, and the coordinates go to that company. Instead, this tool pre-downloads administrative boundaries and works out which polygon a point falls in, in the browser.
- The share link has no coordinates. “Copy share link” puts only the rendered grid and ranking in the link. Which countries and regions, when, and for how long is in there; the raw visit coordinates are not. Points that fell outside any boundary and could not be named are anonymized to “Unknown N” in the link.
What you still need to watch
The tool not sending coordinates does not make the output harmless.
- A share link is still information. A fact like “was in Japan in early June 2023” is in the link. Unless it is meant for anyone, think about who you send it to.
- The original file.
Timeline.jsonis a sensitive file. Do not leave it in a shared cloud folder or a public machine’s Downloads. Delete it when you are done. - Screenshots. A grid or ranking screenshot carries your residency history as-is. Keep that in mind before posting it.
In short
Location history is powerful data, which makes the defaults of whoever handles it matter. This tool’s default is: coordinates do not leave the browser. What you share on top of that is your call.
How to build one is in the guide and in Exporting your Google Timeline.