Google Maps’ Timeline feature (formerly known as Location History) is to some people extremely creepy and gross, and to others incredibly useful as it allows you to go back in time and see where you went on any specific day at any specific time, provided of course that you had your Android phone with you.
Google is preparing a massive overhaul of how Timeline works, one which should hit all users within the next few months (the transition started in December). Timeline will only be stored on each device, if you opt into it, so it will no longer be available from Google’s servers. That’s a boon for privacy, for sure, but in the course of the transition Google did a pretty major oopsie.
Namely, it inadvertently deleted some people’s Timeline data, and it’s gone for good unless they opted into encrypted cloud backups of said data. Unfortunately, it seems highly plausible that only a very small minority of users have done that, and so for those who haven’t and don’t see their Timeline data anymore, there just is no solution – it will forever be lost.
According to a Google spokesperson, this was the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change. That’s not very comforting to those who’ve lost their Timelines forever, of course. The good news, if we can call it that, is that Google seems to know exactly who was affected by this, and has sent emails to those people explaining its error – so if you haven’t received an email like the one in the screenshot above, you’re safe.
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