
Analyzing My Google Location History - NicoJuicy
https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-google-location-history-d3a5c56c7b70?source
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ehsankia
> I assumed confidence to be the probability of each task. However, often they
> do not add up to 100. If they do not represent probabilities what do they
> represent?

The probability of each being true independently?

> How can Google possibly predict activity type between IN_TWO_WHEELER_VEHICLE
> vs IN_FOUR_WHEELER_VEHICLE ?!

Two wheel vehicles can often make it through traffic, in between cars.

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GChevalier
> How can Google possibly predict activity type between IN_TWO_WHEELER_VEHICLE
> vs IN_FOUR_WHEELER_VEHICLE ?!

Could they be using this from accelerometer data instead of GPS?
[https://github.com/guillaume-chevalier/LSTM-Human-
Activity-R...](https://github.com/guillaume-chevalier/LSTM-Human-Activity-
Recognition)

~~~
GChevalier
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13049143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13049143)

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dochtman
I wrote a little script a few years ago to make a nice map out of my location
history:

[https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-
path...](https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/writing/2012/11/28/tracing-a-path.html)

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jefftk
_> What does the activity type "tilting" mean?_

"The device angle relative to gravity changed significantly."

\--
[https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...](https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/android/gms/location/DetectedActivity)

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lars512
I did something like this in a quantified self phase, it's fun to see the
location patterns. I was gridding locations into buckets and scoring the
entropy over time, to see how diverse the set of locations I was going to was.
Long story short, not that diverse. Just over 1 bit was enough! (think: home
or work)

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jfim
We actually did that several years ago in our data viz lab. All of the
(willing) lab members tracked their location data and one student developed a
way to track and visualize co-occurrences of people over time [1].

Another ways to visualize this kind of information is to use space time cube
maps, which turn the time axis into the z-axis for trajectory visualization;
GeoTime[2] is the most well known implementation of it AFAIK.

[1] [http://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/2016-gupta-
Movemen...](http://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/2016-gupta-
MovementSlicer/gupta-PacificVis2016-MovementSlicer.pdf) [2]
[https://geotime.com/products/geotime/](https://geotime.com/products/geotime/)

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tokyodude
it's disappointing that apparently if there is no connection it just throws
the data away. I'd prefer if it saved it locally and uploaded when it can

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pmontra
I'd prefer it to be saved locally or sent to a server of mine with some
standard protocol (maybe NMEA 0183 over HTTP POSTs) and never to Google. Of
course I could write an app for that (and I did some 8 years ago) but it would
be much easier if the OS would cooperate.

By the way, I disabled location services on my devices to prevent at least
this form of spying on me.

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netsharc
OwnTracks is an app that does that,
[https://owntracks.org/](https://owntracks.org/) , but I still haven't set up
my server to receive the data.

It uses MQTT, which is probably fault tolerant/store data locally if it can't
connect to the server right now.

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brecalynch
Funny how Google also consider those places where I have stopped just for a
minute.

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tomglynch
> "My previous phone had some GPS issues, which was leading to my location
> being shown in Arizona, USA"

Sounds more like your gmail account was compromised

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code_duck
Or you’re getting an IP from somewhere associated with a different region.
This happens all the time with my cell connection - it seems the company uses
spare Verizon capacity, and when I (or someone else) looks up my 4G is, it’s
all over the US with no connection to my actual location.

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balibebas
Or was it that trip to Vegas?

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mathur68
I wish \- Article Author

