What Google and Apple know about where you have been

If you have an Android phone, or an iPhone with the Google Maps app, there is a good chance a detailed record exists of everywhere you have been for years, with dates and times.

Most people have never looked at it. It is worth looking once, because it changes how you think about app permissions more effectively than any article can.

Go and look

Google: myactivity.google.com/timeline — or Maps, your profile picture, Your Timeline. Pick a random day from three years ago.

Apple: Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, System Services, Significant Locations. Face ID or passcode required, because Apple treats it as sensitive.

What each actually keeps

Google historically kept a detailed timeline on its servers. Since 2024 this has moved onto the device for new users and is called Timeline, with limited default retention. If you have had the account a long time, the old server-side history may still exist, so check and delete it rather than assuming the change applied to you.

Apple's Significant Locations is stored on the device, end-to-end encrypted, and Apple says it cannot read it. A meaningfully different design, and still a detailed record that anyone holding your unlocked phone can read.

Both are separate from app-level location access, which is where most tracking actually happens.

Turning it off without breaking maps

You can have navigation without a permanent history. They are different settings.

Google: Maps, profile, Your Timeline, the three dots, Location and privacy settings. Turn Timeline off, and set auto-delete to three months. Maps still navigates.

Apple: Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, System Services, Significant Locations, off. Then Clear History.

Both: go through your apps and check which have location set to Always rather than While Using. Very few need Always. A weather app does not; a shopping app certainly does not.

The ad identifier matters more

While you are in there, turn off the single identifier that lets apps track you across each other:

• iPhone: Settings, Privacy and Security, Tracking, turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track".
• Android: Settings, Privacy, Ads, delete the advertising ID.

Five seconds, and it does more than the location settings for most people. More in your phone knows more than your laptop.

Where a VPN fits, honestly

Not here. A VPN changes the address the internet sees; it does not touch GPS, and an app you granted location to is reading the satellite receiver in your pocket. Anyone selling a VPN as location privacy is overselling.

What helps is app permissions, the ad identifier, and turning off history. All free, all in settings you already have.

One practical reason to keep some of it

Timeline is genuinely useful for expenses, for remembering where a restaurant was, and occasionally for proving where you were. A three-month auto-delete keeps the usefulness and loses the decade-long record, which is a reasonable middle.