Where have you been, Google knows

If you saw my post about camping this past weekend, you know I used a couple of screen caps from the Google Maps from my phone to show the campground.  Well, one night I was playing on my phone while everyone was sleeping and while I was on Google Maps, I noticed an option in the menu.

See that?

Right over there,

to the left.

Down there,

a little further.

Yeah,

right

there.

<<<<<<<

 

 

Location History, hmmm!  So I clicked on it.  And it’s exactly what it says it is.  Remember when I took the kids to the Sox game?

My phone is freaking tracking me.  Now I personally don’t care, it’s not like I’m out on a killing spree or anything.  If the cops ever come knocking on my door wanting me, it’ll probably be of the false arrest variety so maybe my phone can be my alibi.

You see up above, last Thursday.  It tells me what time I left home (6:38 am), what time I arrived at work (6:47 am) and how long I stayed (7:06 pm) and that I drove over to Baugo to watch the end of my son’s game.  How long I was there (7:37 pm – 8:15 pm) and what time I arrived back at home (8:21 pm).

To be honest, I think this is cool as hell.  But as you can tell above, the red lines show I was all over the place.  Although those lines don’t show my route, just a direct line between stops.  On this day (my birthday actually), I traveled 26 miles but it says the only places I were was home with some travel time in between.  What I was doing was running errands, but everywhere I went probably has never been “checked in” before so they didn’t register.  Some of them, I probably wasn’t there long enough to register that I stopped.

I zoomed in on the map.  The bottom right corner is my home.  What I do remember from this day is first I went to the top red line which was the post office, then the little triangle to the left of that is the bank, but neither of those lines go directly to where those places are on the map.  I think I went back home after that so I don’t know where the 1 hour, 50 minutes comes in.

Later in the day, the big loop at the bottom, we drove out to IHOP for lunch and hit Kmart to pick up a White Sox shirt for Samantha to wear to the game.  None of those showed up on the travel, nor do the red lines correspond to exactly where we were at.  I also noticed on the days I go to work and back and nowhere else, sometimes it says I traveled a mile, some days less, some days a little more.  Considering I only travel one route to and from work, I’m not sure why that’s different.  So maybe it’s not as cool as I thought.

I wonder if the NSA receives these reports from everybody’s phones.