Does Google know where I have been? The three switches to check

On 21 September the Irish data protection authority fined Google Ireland 403 million euro. The reason has to do with location data, and the story went round the papers with the headline you would expect.

Something else interests me. The fine is about the past, your phone is about now, and there is less continuity between the two than it seems. In the meantime, though, you have those settings too, and you have almost certainly never opened them.

Let us take the two things separately: first what the decision actually says, then the three checks to run.

What the decision says, and what it does not

The verified facts, from the Irish authority’s statement and from the European Data Protection Board’s.

The fine is 403 million euro and the addressee is Google Ireland Limited. Three features were examined, not two as I have read here and there: Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy.

There are four findings. On the first two features, the lawfulness and the fairness of the processing of location data, and the retention periods. On the third, the failure to demonstrate compliance. Transparency, meanwhile, covers all three. The GDPR articles cited by the European statement are 5, 6, 12 and 13.

There is also an order: Google has to bring itself into line within six months. The full decision, as I write, has not been published yet.

And now the detail that changes how all of it reads. The inquiry covers the period from 25 May 2018 to 4 February 2020. Six years ago.

Over those six years Google has changed quite a lot: it brought in auto-delete, it altered the default settings, and in December 2023 it announced the move of Timeline onto the device instead of onto its own servers. So a fine like this is not a photograph of what you have in your phone today, and anyone telling the story as though it were is giving you wrong information. That does not mean it counts for nothing: it means it counts for other reasons, namely that a European authority has established that that way of handling the data was not acceptable.

On the rest I am cautious out of necessity. That the fine only becomes payable after a judicial confirmation, and that Google spoke of “historical policies since updated”, I read in the press and not in the official documents. So that is how I pass it on.

The principle you need before the steps

Before going into the menus, there is one thing to grasp, otherwise the checks achieve nothing.

The settings are separate, and each acts only on itself. Google’s official page repeats it for every one of them, with the same formula: turning off Timeline does not affect how location data is saved or used by the other settings. It holds the other way round too.

That explains why so many people switch off location history, feel they are sorted, and are not: Web & App Activity carries on saving an approximate location, derived from the general area and from the device’s IP address, as Google itself documents.

The second thing is simpler still and plenty of people get it wrong: turning off does not delete. They are two different actions, and sure enough the menus give you two separate items, “Turn off” and “Turn off and delete activity”. Switch off and nothing more, and what is already there sits there until you delete it yourself.

The three checks

The steps below come from Google’s official support pages, read on 5 October 2026. One warning, though: Google reorganises these screens often, and even its own official pages are not aligned with one another today, given that the same section is called “Personalisation & activity” in one place and “History settings” in another. If your phone shows an item worded a little differently, that is normal. Go by the sense, the key words are the ones below.

1. Web & App Activity. Open your Google Account, go to Data & privacy and look for the "Web & App Activity" setting. From there you can see what is being saved, turn it off choosing between Turn off and Turn off and delete activity, and above all set auto-delete. The periods available are 3, 18 or 36 months. Inside this setting there are also two optional boxes worth a look: one includes your Chrome history and activity on sites and apps that use Google services, the other includes voice and audio activity.
2. Timeline. Today it is managed from the Google Maps app: tap your profile picture, then Timeline, then More and Location and privacy settings. There you find the switch, auto-delete (3, 18 or 36 months here too) and the items for deleting, from a single day up to Delete all Timeline data. On iPhone the alternative route goes through the Google app: account picture, Manage your Google Account, Data & privacy, the History settings section, Timeline.
3. Location Accuracy. On Android this sits in the phone's settings, not the account's: Location, then location services, then the item that improves location accuracy. One clarification is needed here that Google writes down and almost nobody reads: turning accuracy off does not switch off the phone's location, which stays on. For iPhone it is managed in Apple's settings, and on the pages I read there is no documented route.

Where to look at what has been recorded: the page myactivity.google.com for activity, and the Timeline section inside Google Maps for places.

What you actually lose

Here I have to give you a less clear-cut answer than you would like, and I would rather tell you why.

The support pages describe what you get when a setting is on, but they have no section explaining what stops working when you turn it off. The only losses listed explicitly concern the device’s location, not the two account settings: with location off, the phone does not share it with any app, you cannot find a lost device, you cannot share your position on Maps and you do not get earthquake alerts.

For the rest, all you can do is report what Google says those settings are for, and draw the consequences. Timeline is there to reconstruct the map of places visited and journeys made: switch it off and that history stops forming. Web & App Activity is there to personalise some services, to show more relevant ads and to give you search results based on what you searched for before: switch it off and that personalisation thins out.

Any statement more precise than that, of the “turn off X and Y stops working” kind, I did not find documented. If you read one somewhere, ask for the source.

Three things I could not verify

I write them down because in an article like this, being honest about what is not known is worth as much as the rest.

I could not find an official page stating when and how “Location History” became “Timeline”: the new name is on the pages, the announcement of the change is not. I could not find any current page saying what the default auto-delete is for an account created today, given that the only official source is a Google blog post from 2020 and at least one value has changed since. And I could not find any official source on what became of the location data already saved in the account before the migration onto the device, beyond the line saying Google keeps it until you delete it.

On those three points, if you find something different written by Google, that is what counts and not what I have written.

Where to start, if you only do one thing

Set auto-delete to 3 months on Web & App Activity.

It is the check that costs least and gives most: it takes no feature away from you, because personalisation carries on working on recent data, and it shortens the tail of saved material about you by a lot. If you then want a second step, open myactivity.google.com and spend half an hour looking at your real history. It is the most effective way to decide knowing what you are deciding, far better than any article, this one included.

If the subject of data kept inside an account interests you, I have also written about it in Your phone photos: how to actually keep them without paying every month.