Insights

How to Setup Google Maps to Automatically Delete Location History?

Rahul Woll
Published: March 20, 2024
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What's on this page:
Automatically Delete Location History

Do you know Google save your location history?

There is a reason to store your location history that is to provide your better support based on your location. You can delete or keep that history according to your needs; you can control that feature, if you are worried about your privacy is being vulnerable. Someone like you is probably looking for that solutions. I am writing this article to help you with setup your Google Maps to Automatically Delete Location History.

After all nobody wants to share their location history to track every movement by the Google. But you can control location sharing option which is possible in Android Devices. Step to automatically delete location history in Google.

Automatically Delete Location History

There is a way to enable this feature on your Android smartphone. The first method and the alternate method if the first one doesn’t work for you:

  1. Open Google Maps.
  2. Click onto the Menu option
  3. Select Timeline
  4. Now, switch to gear icon from the right side.
  5. Click on setting and privacy
  6. This will take you to the Maps Activity page which features the option named “Automatically Delete Location History
  7. Now, you have three options to choose how long to keep your location history.

Keep until I delete manually: Your location history will be stored on your phone until you decide to personally delete it.

Keep for 18 months: Your location history will be stored for a year and a half, after that it will be deleted automatically.

Keep for 3 months: You can keep history saved for three months now, after that history will be deleted automatically in every three months.

After you have chosen your preferred location setting, click on Next, and a page will appear showing your preference has been saved.

Your existing data that has been stored for longer than the time period you have chosen will be deleted, and your new delete location history setting will be saved.

Benefits of Automatically Delete Location History

By default, Google store a permanent history of everything a user has searched for, each website they have visited, activity from any other app, or device that uses Google services, and a record of their physical movements collected from using Google Maps or an Android device.

It’s a great initiative that users have always been able to turn off – or “pause” – that tracking in a settings page, Activity Controls, and, if they remember to, they can manually clear the saved information using the Delete Activity page. But both those options have downsides: if tracking is turned off entirely, some Google products and services no longer work correctly, while deleting activity manually can be a chore, particularly for users with more than one Gmail account.

Conclusion
With this feature, you will be able to continue making use of the location-tracking option provided by Google. You don’t have to worry about the company having access to your location records beyond three to 18 months.