Spying myself through the lense of Google Maps Timeline data

I took an export of my Google Maps Timeline data and discovered it to be a treasure trove of information. I was initially only interested in seeing how often I visit the local boulder gym, but I found myself soon digging into more such details.

The data consist of activities and place visits. An activity looks like this:

You can peek through the internals in a way since you can see which options for a given activity Google algorithms have considered.

A place visit, on the other hand, is:

As you can see, the data contains not just the place you can see from Maps you have visited but actually the metadata and the confidence scores of where Google thinks you have been.

Using the dataset, it is pretty easy to find out which locations you have visited and how long you have stayed. I co-authored with ChatGPT this simple script that outputs how many hours and times you have visited a given place.

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