Google knows where you are, but does he know who you are?

Takeout offers a simple utility: the ability to upload your photos, for example, allows you to download them elsewhere. And it's really good that Google does not hold your contacts hostage. Google also allows users to browse their saved location history. This interface is very Google to the extent that it makes accessible a huge amount of information; it's less like Google in the way the material feels useless and is worth hardly being studied. In Takeout, however, location data can be exported in raw form. In my case, this produced a file containing hundreds of thousands of entries, each encoding time (up to the millisecond), latitude and longitude (with an estimate of their accuracy) and a estimate of my activity ("ON_BICYCLE", for example).

Placed in a vast spreadsheet and isolated from Google's own interfaces, these data become both conceptually clear, surveillance par excellence and literally incomprehensible. In 2014, a high school student named Theo Patt released a tool, Localization History Visualization, to shape this information, placing the full Google Location History of users on a map. intense color code. Centers for Disaster Control and Prevention. It has become a minor sensation, and tens of thousands of visits to his site have followed. It was a rare opportunity for Google users to see their own slice of old company data, presented just outside the context in which it was collected, which made it totally new.

When you look in the last years of your life – saved by your laptop and phone, then self-assigned from your Google Account – your first impulse is forensics. And whether you assume the role of defense, prosecution, judge or juror, you will have a lot to do. If you opt in completely for certain Google products (in my case, various Google apps on an iPhone, including Google Maps), the years of location history will be displayed as bright circles, shaded from purple to green, from yellow to yellow. red and superimposed on a world map. To explore this data, it is to switch, in a few seconds, among extremely disparate emotional states: surprise, disorientation, curiosity, disappointment.

I first looked at my zoomed map and thought, is that it? A ray of glowing breath has surrounded the city of New York, where I live; weaker orbs floated on the cities where I visited my family. In Nashville, for a conference. A failed report in Northern California. Some holidays, stops at airports, weekends near the city. Google's device was called here, it seemed, to tell me to travel more. (According to Google, the company does not share users 'location histories with advertisers, nor does it serve users' ads based on specific locations in their location histories.)

Then I zoomed in. The trips to see the family were rendered with a cold detail. They showed a city where I spent most of the first 18 years of my life, reduced to the skeletal routine of a repeat outside visitor. The purple haze over the airport resolved, more closely, points to doors C18 and C25, where I arrived or left or from where I walked to use a bathroom near door C9, just before Christmas 2017. Another trail to my mother's house was glowing; some jogging around the neighborhood sounded the house in blue. I could choose the restaurants of the city where we went together and the downtown bar where I met an old friend. I followed a mysterious series of weak points down the road, reminding me halfway that they would lead to the regional fast food that I loved when I was small. I zoomed in on a point just north of the house and ended up at the church for the annual Christmas Family Service. I scrolled further and saw my annual stations: the car park, the chapel, the benches to the left of the lectern and finally the columbarium to visit my father's remains.