If you have a Google account and you have Google apps’  “Location Reporting” or “Location Services” active on your phone, you can find out where you have been for just about any day that you have had the feature turned on. These could be apps on an iPhone or iPad, or just built into your Android phone. Whenever an app shows you that something is nearby, suggests local businesses, or helps you find the closest gas station, it’s using Location Reporting.

It is an “opt-in” service, but many people have said yes to it without realizing when they first initialized a new phone.  Location Reporting sends your GPS or other location information to Google periodically through out the day.  The information that has been logged for your device can be viewed here:  https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/
It looks like this:

With this service you can see the basic routes you have taken and the time and date that each particular reading was logged. By clicking on a different date on the calendar, you will see the information logged for that day.

You must log in with your own Google account to view the information, so it is restricted, …as long as no one has hacked your account.

There may be good reasons why this information might be helpful to you. If you have your own business, for example, you might want to remember times that you visited a certain locations during the day.

The maps are not always accurate, as sometimes the information could put you slightly off track. My log often shows me in the middle of the Hudson River (without a bridge nearby). It not only uses GPS information but could also be using wifi or more likely cell tower location information. That could put a reading off by miles depending on the density of cell towers in your vicinity. If you click on a node on the map you may see a light blue circle around that location, that indicates that the reading may be off, presumably by as much as the area in the circle.

Area of possible error in blue.

 

Don’t want to be logged?

It is fairly easy to turn off the reporting services. Go to the Settings menu and look for either Privacy > Location or Location Access or something similar.  You can also go here for iPhone settings info or here for Android settings information.

You can also go to your location history map and delete the specific history for any given day, or delete your entire history all at once.