Have never found myself in and cannot imagine a circumstance where I'd need to know my precise location at a point in time years ago, or really even at any time other than the present.
I travel quite a lot and I routinely look back at my trips from years ago to see what restaurants I visited and where I stayed. It shows me my path on a map and also shows my photos taken at each location which lets me relive my trips easily. It's quite an amazing feature most people don't even know exists.
I just did it the other day to recommend a hole in the wall restaurant in Italy I was last at in 2016. I couldn't even narrow it down to the correct street until I was able to find it on Google timeline.
Need? Probably not. It was certainly handy though knowing the week I was there and what the interior looked like.
I suppose this is a bit of a special case but the US and Canadian governments both require you to provide the full list of trips from the last ten years when applying for citizenship and permanent residency. Timeline is incredibly helpful there.
Could come up with a thousand reasons, but if you want a quick "Fun" reason and a quick "Utilitarian" reason:
Fun: I travel a ton, I love looking at where I went to relive the experience. Especially if it was a recent travel and I'm showing things off to friends asking about it. I just open up the Timeline and say "Okay, well this day we flew in - then we took a 4 hour car ride, then we hung in this town for a few days, then took a boat to this island for some camping, then flew over to this city for a week, and..."
Utilitarian: As a US Citizen living abroad, I apply for the FEIE tax exemption every year to help me keep my first ~$120k as untaxed from the Feds (Should be my entire income, but no - US needs to tax on citizenship and not residency like nearly everyone else.. but I digress). For this rule, I need to have full 24-hour days in foreign territory, so for my documentation to ensure I'm still within my limit, I like pulling up Timeline - snapping a screenshot/export and saving it for later should I ever be audited.
I love location data. In fact when I travel, I bring a GPS logger to track all my locations, it helps me sync up my ok photos and retrace my steps. I have pretty precise maps of ally big trips in the last 10 years.
A GPS logger? What does that do over just your phone? I've been wanting an app to log my location outside of Google but was having trouble picking one to trust
My main concern for having a dedicated GPS logging device is the battery drain of the tracking apps on my phone. Used to have a Transystem 747ProS [1] which uses a Nokia BL-5C battery and would last a few days. However, that device was quite dated even then and its accuracy often lacking.
Now I am carrying a dedicated Android phone with me (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed. The app starts tracking as soon as the phone is moving and saves all the data on device. I used to have an instance of Owntracks [3] running, but now I just run a simple Flask app which pipes the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network when I am home. To visualize the tracks, I import them into QGIS. As the phone is solely used for tracking and only when I take it with me, the battery lasts about three days.
I'm not sure it's what you need but OSMAnd is open source and can record your movements. I use it to record some of my bicycle rides, then I share it to my laptop for a backup, or to whatever share target the app can find.
The plus version is on F-Droid for free. It has unlimited map downloads.
I imagine having that record your movements 24/7 would drain the battery like crazy, though.
If you look at Google Timeline, sometimes the track it records is not particularly accurate, likely because it's only getting updates for significant changes in your location.
I also use OwnTracks to keep track of myself, and there I can see the individual points it gets from the OS notifying it of location changes, and... it's honestly not that great sometimes.
I'm recording one position every 5 seconds when I want to get a GPX track of my ride. If I only wanted a record of my general position I guess I could take 1 position every 5 minutes. However I keep my GPS turned off and I never gave my location history to Google in all these years so I really don't know what the impact would be on battery.
Proofing you were not at a crime scene at a certain time. You disabled location saving - that's suspicious?
/s
More serious, if it would be my data under my control, it can be fun checking the past. Exploring where you travelled and when .. but that is kind of my buisness amd not googles. But since I use a android phone, they have it anyway.
It works handily with Google photos where you can break out an itinerary of an old trip. As with most things, it's for nostalgia so if you're not wired that way, it's not really useful to you. I love reminiscing over old trips and having these details.
Perhaps you’ll stay that way, but it’s pretty common.
For work, I have to produce reports of countries I’ve visited and dates. So looking at location history is pretty handy for remembering if I visited Sweden in 2018 or 2019. Etc etc.
If a feature is being proposed and mandatory, then the existence of one person who doesn't like it is significant.
But if it's already optional, and being removed entirely, then that persons's existence isn't that relevant; what's relevant is the people who DO like it and are losing something for them.
I've used it for estimating driving miles for taxes (cause I suck at tracking it during the ride)
I've also used it for remembering what I was doing on specific days. It's wild how the location movements can accurately prompt my brain for the activities on those days
I was a victim of a car accident. When I was filing the claim with their insurance provider, they wanted the exact location and time of the incident as proof; Timeline has absolutely come in handy for me :)
It's really helpful for remembering that one random restaurant from five years ago in a different state, or retracing our travels through a foreign country so we can better match them with our photos.
Google remembers many places I've totally forgotten about, and it's really nice to be able to revisit the nostalgia when I'm older.
I've been logging this for more than a decade, and it's a lot of fun to go back in time and revisit and rediscover old favorites.
It's one of my favorite features in all of Google :(
I've found it mildly useful for when I say I'll meet up with a friend but I've forgotten their address, so then look at my timeline to see where it is (since I generally remember the last time I saw a friend, if not exactly where their house was).