Google Maps has long had a "Timeline" feature that essentially is a historical map of everywhere you and your device loaded with Google Maps has been if you've turned on the "Location History" setting. That data is stored in the cloud, but Google is going to stop doing that and will keep it on the device only, as well as encrypting it on the device. They're also changing the location history auto-delete time frame to 3 months by default instead of 18 months. This will make it impossible for law enforcement to force Google into handing over data like "give us a list of everyone in this area at this time" or even "give us the history of this user's activity for this time frame" as they simply won't have that data available. I wonder how much of a hit, if any, it has to Google's ad business? If the point is to avoid law enforcement involving Google in investigations, presumably they don't have enough data to also target ads at users based on fine-grained location too?
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