Google being Google wants to know everything about everyone, it’s this information it uses to sell targeted advertising space that bring in the vast majority of its income. One of the pieces of information it requests from its users is their location, even on a device without GPS they can get a relatively accurate idea of this from your IP address and if you are using a GPS enabled device this can be accurate to the metre.

They are completely open about this and if you don’t want Google to do this then you can turn it all off here. In fact I believe it’s disabled by default.

However, I allow Google to gather this information from me because they make it all available to me. For example, here is my location history from this bank holiday weekend.

The Google interface for this information is quite basic, although all the data is accessible the maximum period of time you can view at once is 30 days. Handily though Google with happily let you download all the raw location data via its Takeout feature which you can then upload to 3rd party services such as this one.