Frequently Asked Questions

Does Google retain Location History data forever?

You can configure a retention period in your Google account settings by using the auto-delete setting. With that said, even if you have disabled auto-deletion from the account settings it's been observed that after some undetermined amount of months Google might start dropping some attributes of your raw location history data. Timestamps, latitudes and longitudes seem to always be conserved, but old values for other attributes such as altitude, speed, or heading, might be discarded without prior warning.

You should therefore not rely on Google Location History data to be always available. If you want to conserve all historic data consider periodically making extractions and backing them up or look for other alternative services.

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Last update: 2024-03-24