Google Maps May Have Accidentally Deleted All Your Timeline Data

Good News Or Bad?

The good news is that there is a very good chance that all of your historical location data from Google Maps may have just been irrevocably deleted, the bad news is that all your Google Maps Timeline data might be gone forever.  Your feelings about this depend on how you use Google Maps; if you like the ability to look back at your location data to figure out where that bar you visited once three years ago is then this is upsetting, if you prefer to keep your privacy then this is a brilliant development.  This deletion was a mistake, likely a problematic Google Maps update is to blame, this is not something Alphabet chose to do on purpose.

The way this deletion could come about is because of a change to Google Maps from more than a few years ago, when Alphabet switched from storing the location data from Google Maps Timeline on their cloud to storing it locally on your device.  If you did get the update and no longer have any location history the chances are it is gone forever.  There is one possible way you might be able to recover it, but only if you chose the option to store an encrypted copy of your Google Maps Timeline to the cloud.  If you didn’t chose that option way back when the change was made, unfortunately there is no other way to get your history back.

Then again, for many the complete erasure of that data is good news.