Easy When You Know How
Daniel Booth downloads everything Google knows about him
As communist regimes collapsed across eastern Europe 30 years ago, millions of people were finally able to see what private information the secret police kept on them. These days, you just click a button and wait for it to download to your PC desktop.
My Location History downloaded in just four seconds – perhaps I hadn’t left my bedroom for weeks
A glib comparison, I admit. We don’t live in East Germany, and Google isn’t the Stasi. But these days it’s so much easier for people in power (companies and governments) to track what you do. Google doesn’t have to rely on doublecrossing neighbours, or spies trundling through backstreets in Trabants. Merely signing into Google tells them where you are, what you look for online, who you email and more.
It’s enough to make you paranoid, but I’m too busy for that. I’m just curious.
Does Google know more about me than I do about myself? Perhaps it could tell me whether I’m coming or going, or what day it is, or if my head is screwed on. Can Google make my life sound more interesting than it is?
So I ordered a Google ‘Takeout’. How quaint is that? To make it sound as mundane as phoning up for a stuffed crust pizza (and not at all like something the Stasi would do), Google calls its data-download service ‘Takeout’. That’s all you do, see: you don’t download years of intensely private info. You’re just casually taking it out - like a library book, albeit an autobiography of your digital life.
You start at https://takeout.google.com, where you’re faced with pre-ticked boxes for every Google service, including the biggies (Chrome, Gmail, Maps) and some that sound made up (Hangouts on Air? Textcube?). The best approach is to click the blue ‘Deselect all’ option to untick all options, then work your way through the ones you’re interested in.
I wanted to avoid drowning in data, so I ticked Location History only, planning to come back for more once I’d got the hang of it. I clicked ‘Next step’ at the bottom, prompting Google to ask me in which format I’d like my data served up (I chose .zip), how big (2GB - any bigger would split the data into several files) and how often (just a one-off, thank you very much).
Google then told me it was preparing
my data, and that it may take “hours or possibly days” to finalise. It took just four seconds, which seemed suspiciously fast (perhaps I hadn’t left my bedroom for weeks). I clicked the Download link, and one ZIP extraction later opened the .json file in Notepad.
I’m not sure what I expected - 20 years’ worth of videos showing me dashing through Waterloo station, perhaps. But when Google says data, it really means raw, brutal, head-spinning data: latitude and longitude numbers (see screenshot 2 ), with no obvious way of translating them into anything meaningful.
To do that, visit https://location historyvisualizer.com and import the Notepad file. Your locations will appear as red blobs on a heatmap (see screenshot 1 ). Turns out Google got it spot on, tracing my movements between Surrey, London, Canterbury and the New Forest. And the odd thing about all this? It felt reassuring, not unsettling, as though Google was acting as a guardian angel not Big Brother.
But downloading data is an extreme sport. I’d rather play Scrabble than skateboard, so I retreated to https:// myactivity.google.com, where Google shows you clearly and without downloads what you’ve been up to online in recent months. It’s nothing less than your life scrolling before your eyes.
Need help downloading your data?
Let us know: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk