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Your phone has been keeping a diary for three years. Have you read it?

September 5, 2026 805 words

Do you know how far you travelled last year? I did not. When I opened the file the number was 9,781 kilometres, and inside it was a day I had completely forgotten.

One evening I got curious: how far did I actually travel last year? My guess was somewhere around three thousand kilometres. I exported my location history from my phone, opened the file, and the number was 9,781. Three times my guess.

The number was not the interesting part. Inside the file there was a day in October I had entirely forgotten — I had driven from Ankara down to Adana, four hundred and thirty kilometres, and I have no memory of it. No photos, no notes, nothing. Just a line.

Where this record comes from

Google Maps has a feature called Timeline, and if it is on it runs quietly in the background. It records the places you stop, how long you stay, and the journeys in between. Not for advertising — to show back to you, in a “where were you this time last year” sort of way.

Across 2024 and 2025 Google changed this record in an important way: the data now lives on your phone rather than on their servers. That is good news for privacy. The bad news is that if you lose the phone, or move to a new one, the history goes with it. If you do not have a copy, nobody does.

What is actually in it

Less alarming than you expect, and more than you expect. There is no point-by-point GPS trace in there — Google is not following you second by second. Instead it keeps three kinds of record: the places you stopped, the movements between them, and the occasional position dropped along the way while you were moving.

So the file says something like: “on the morning of 12 July you spent three hours here, then drove for two hours, passing through these few points, then stopped here.” Multiply that by a year and you have a fairly detailed diary.

A full year usually comes to one or two megabytes. Smaller than a photograph. Inside it is everywhere you went.

So what do you do with it

Most people never download this file, because they do not know what it is for. A few ideas.

Back it up and forget it. The dullest option and the most valuable one. Since the data now lives only on the phone, taking one export a year secures your history. The file is small; attach it to an email to yourself and you are done.

Answer the numbers you were curious about. How many days did you travel, what was the longest single journey, which month was busiest. We guess badly at these — I was out by a factor of three.

Open it in other maps. The file converts to GPX or KML, and in that shape most mapping tools will display it. Hiking, cycling and route-planning apps generally understand those formats.

Watch it. This is what I ended up doing. Animating that line across a map turns it into something else entirely — numbers become a journey. Watching a year go past in thirty seconds is a strange feeling: you see at a glance where you went and how far, and mostly you think “did I really cover that much?”.

One warning: straight lines

Draw the file on a map and the first thing you notice will be odd. City sections wind about, and then the stretch between two cities suddenly becomes an arrow-straight line.

The reason is simple: to save battery on a motorway the phone samples location rarely. A four-hour drive is sometimes recorded as nothing more than “you left here, you arrived there”. The road in between is not in the file.

This matters, because a straight line is not just ugly, it is wrong. Ankara to Şanlıurfa is 598 kilometres as the crow flies; the road you actually drive is 842. The straight line swallows forty-one per cent of the journey. Your total comes out short, and the long way around the mountains never appears at all.

The good news is that it is a fillable gap. The real road route between two points can be computed and the line drawn along it. That was the part we spent the most time on building Wanderlapse, because the difference is not small — hundreds of kilometres over a year.

Where to start

All it takes is exporting the file from your phone. On Android it is inside the phone’s settings; on iPhone it is inside the Google Maps app — a few taps either way. There is no point trying from a computer, because the data is not there.

After that the file is yours. Drop it in a folder and forget it, or open it and look at where you went last summer. I did the second, and found a day I had forgotten. That alone was worth five minutes.