Google Maps has become a pretty important app for those who are traveling to both familiar and unfamiliar places. While Location History is pretty important for you to be able to get a grasp of all the places that you’ve visited, sometimes you want to turn it off or to delete some places you’ve visited altogether. A minor update for the app now makes it easier for you to delete items in your timeline in case you don’t want to erase your entire location history.
If you’re not yet familiar, yes your Google Maps has a timeline. It is where you can see all the places and routes that you’ve visited and you can even share them with friends who are planning to visit the same places. But sometimes there are places that you want to remove from your timeline but you don’t want to delete your entire history. With the bulk delete, you can choose multiple places and then delete them from your timeline and location history in a single blow.
Previously, you could only delete part of your timeline or all of it at once by choosing the date range. You can still do that now but at least you have the option of choosing which ones you want to remove. But Google also wants to remind you that there are a lot of benefits of keeping your location history turned on and keeping all the places you’ve visited. You’re contributing to information about the wait time at restaurants, and groceries, parking situations in various places, etc.
Having your location history will also contribute to the algorithm for personalized recommendations for nearby restaurants, coffee shops, parks, historical locations, etc. But of course if your priority is more to protect your privacy and not share data with Google, then deleting your history and cleaning your timeline is more important. By default, Location History is already off and if you turn it on, you still have options of keeping it for three months or 18 months before it’s automatically deleted.
The Google Maps update also brings Incognito Mode to iOS devices but Android phones already have this feature. It functions similarly to how incognito works on browsers and if you use this, you won’t see any personalized features and it won’t update your Location History as well.
