Google's Timeline feature, originally known as Location History will be finally going offline on June 9, 2025. Users across the world have been receiving emails from Google informing them about the deadline and reminding that their location data will be deleted unless it is saved on their device. Google had announced the move last year with the first deadline being December 1, 2024 but decided to extend it to give users more time to make the changes.
"Timeline is changing and will now be created on your device. As part of this, you'll need to choose settings for your data by June 9, 2025 to avoid losing visits and routes," read the email from Google.
What is Timeline?
Timeline is a fun feature that allows users to revisit the places they have explored and the routes they took in the past. Akin to Google Photos memories, it is a geographic recap with a logbook for everywhere you went.
What's changing?
As per the California-based company, Timeline will now be saved independently on each individual smartphone, instead of the cloud. Visits and places you explored that are older than three months will be automatically deleted unless users take specific action to save the trips.
Additionally, only 90 days of data will be transferred to a user's device after the deadline has elapsed, six months from now.
While Timeline data will be available on the users' devices, it will not be accessible on web browsers. As per the tech giant, since the data shown on Timeline comes directly from smartphones, it won't be available on Maps on computer web browsers after the data is moved.
How to keep Timeline data?
While Google has launched the service to increase user privacy, some are worried that data about their travels and places they have visited over the years so may not be saved. In order to keep the existing Timeline data, the settings must be updated:
- Make sure you have Google Maps app version 11.106 or up, Android 6.0 or up
- Open the app and click on Explore Timeline
- Tap Next on the card, alerting of the change
- Choose how many months worth of Timeline data you want to leep
- Choose if you want to continue sending user data to Google
- Tap Done
Back-up Timeline data
You can automatically back up your Timeline if you need to switch devices. When you back up your Timeline data, it saves an encrypted copy of your data on Google's servers that can be then imported to the new device. To move an existing backup to a different device, simply import the backup by going into settings.
