I woke up a few months ago to the upsetting news that Google is sunsetting the Timeline on Desktop feature.

I was furious about this change, but when I tried to communicate my outrage to the folks around me, I was met with blank stares and shrugged shoulders. Most people around me didn’t seem to even know that the Timeline feature existed and hence had no idea what the change to this feature implied.

This an evangelical post - Basically my attempt to explain to an intelligent (and skeptical) Normal ¹, what Timeline is and why it matters.

Normal: Lets start from basics - What is timeline?

Datadude: I think you mean Timeline.

N: Sigh… Ok dude, what is Timeline?

D: Every few seconds your phone sends it’s GPS coordinates to one of Google’s servers. This data is recorded and processed by Google. You can view a historic record of that data using the Google Maps Web app and check where you were physically located at any point in time over the past `n' years.

N: Wow I had no idea - That’s kinda cool!

D: Yeah, it’s very cool!

Unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of people are not aware of the existence of Timeline - Many people I know didn’t switch it on and their data was not even recorded.

Of the ones who have it switched on, a large fraction know of it’s existence on an abstract level, but have never actually explored it in a meaningful way.

N: Ok I’ll bite - How do I see my Timeline?

It used to be that you could open up your Timeline on any device you are logged into your Google account on. By using a service called Google Takeout, you could also download a json file containing your entire Timeline history data.

Going forth Google is making a change where the Timeline data will all live on your mobile device and not be maintained on their servers - You will have an option to keep an encrypted backup on their servers, but this is for the purpose of maintaining Timeline continuity when you change your mobile device. There have been complaints from several users who have lost decades of data due to dark patterns and weird bugs in this migration process.

N: Hmm ok, so I spent like 5 mins playing around with this… Now what? I mean you can geek out over this data all you want, but can you bottom line it for me? What’s the point of it?

The way I see it, there are a few different answers to that question.

Sentimental answer:

What is the point of a photo album? Maybe I’m just weird, but retracing my physical journeys is a great way to reminisce about my holiday or even some siginificant date in my past.

In this vein, I came across the following project by Chan Perry, who used her and her boyfriend’s data to figure out the number of times they could’ve potentially met before they actually did.

Practical answer:

For the non-sentimental hardasses among you here are some practical uses:

I wrote a whole blog post about how I leveraged Timeline data to fill out onerous visa application forms.
Mileagewise allows you to use your Timeline data in the US to claim tax rebates!
J.S. Morin writes that he uses Timeline as an “argument killing machine”. Being able to save time and/or money is one thing, but nothing compares to the rush of being able to whip out your phone and conclusively prove your spouse wrong about something.
Figuring out what credit card items mean - Sometimes I will be going through my credit card statement and see a weird entry from a couple of weeks ago that I don’t recognize. Fortunately I can use Timeline to look up where I was on that date and figure out that this is the holding company that owns the restaurant I ate at on that day.
In a similiar vein to 4. I was able to find the name of a quaint little restaurant I dined at in Milan, while I was on a trip there a couple of years ago.

Who knows what the future holds? Having this data might pay off in unexpected ways at some point and even if it doesn’t, it’s better to have it and not need it than otherwise.

Philosophical answer:

I saved the best (And most controversial) argument for the end. There is a certain point of view that the human mind is a computational process - A self-propagating, dynamic collection of data and patterns ². Death is the erasure of those patterns from the universe. For most of human history these computational patterns - The essence of who we are - were confined to our brains. In today’s age however, significant chunks of our memories and identities exist externally in digital exobrains - Our laptops, mobile devies and other digital extensions of our minds.

Taken to it’s logical conclusion, this viewpoint dictates that deleting a significant chunk of your digitally stored patterns is like suffering brain damage, or even a small-scale death! If that seems far-fetched to you, imagine how you’d feel if all existing digital photos of you were irrecoverably deleted?

Your Google Timeline is a high resolution projection of your computational process and it’s incredibly special that you have access to it (Unlike most humans that have ever lived). To lose it would be to let a piece of yourself fade into oblivion. Do not go gentle into that good night!

Understanding this point will also help you understand the outrage around this move in certain internet circles - It’s as if Google is casually committing data genocide, and no one seems to care.

N: Woah, when did this turn into a Black Mirror episode? The philosophical stuff seems a bit far-fetched to me, but if this data is as potentially useful as you say, isn’t it dangerous for me to let Google have a copy? Aren’t I better off not saving it with them?

Look, at this point, we’ve all signed away our lives to our tech overlords. If they want to, they could squash you like a cockroach with or without your Timeline data. Saving it down just means that you have access to the data yourself and can use it for your own ends if you ever want to.

N: Ok I think you’ve successfully Pascal wager-ed me into it - Even if this data is functionally worthless to me at this moment, it costs nothing to save it down and have it in case it becomes useful later on. Is there a detailed guide somewhere on the internet that gives me step by step instructions on how to proceed with the Timeline migration?

D: Fear not my friend, the Datadude has you covered. Now that you’re (somewhat) convinced of the importance of your Timeline data, you can proceed to my FAQ for converts to learn exactly the steps you must take in order to safely migrate to the new version of Timeline without losing your data.

Footnotes

I hope that readers will appreciate my use of the judgement-free “Normal” rather than the pejorative “Normie”. ↩
This perspective is far less controversial today than it was decades ago when pioneers of Artificial Intelligence declared that the brain was “merely a meat machine.” In the age of Artifical Intelligence, this idea has seeped into public consciousness and some would even call it obviously true. Yet, it remains one of the foundational concepts in computer science, intimately tied to the Church-Turing thesis and the simulation hypothesis. By liberating us from the dogma of any single computational substrate, it reminds us that, in the end, “it’s Turing machines all the way down.” For an exploration of the mind-bending possibilities that arise from this idea, I highly recommend Permutation City by Greg Egan. ↩