Pop quiz: Do you know where you ate dinner on September 9, 2016? And how long did it take you to get to work on Thursday, February 23, 2017? Where were you on the afternoon of March 9, 2015?
You probably don’t know the answers to these questions — but Google might.
How? It’s thanks to a feature nestled away in your Google account called Location History. If you care about your privacy, you should probably check it out.
Location History is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a comprehensive history of locations you’ve visited, as tracked by your smartphone’s GPS. Think about that for a second. Every dinner round a friend’s house, every boring commute, every late-night takeaway run — any time you went anywhere with your smartphone, it’s on there, going back years.
It powers some useful features in Google’s products, and many people keep it switched on for that reason. But in the process, you’re give a private company a staggering amount of information about your private life, for free.