Google is too clever

Have you ever had a phone or tablet (which logged into the same google account) stolen/sold/lent without removing the account details?

If so, you can login to the same account and find/ring/nuke the device from here

Never. I am on my second android (got the first 2 years ago and I still have it)

Hells bells.

It knows that when I was working at Whitby I called at the Grapes for a pint on my way to Filey, picked up the gf and called at Tesco on the way back from the Grapes.

Mind you I never went to Hull on the train the next day.

My GM Timeline is always empty, probably because I keep mobile data turned off on my Nexus 5X Oreo.

Those places will be somewhere picked up by a GPS enabled Android device that's logged in as you and enabled for location history.

Sounds right.

Curious...

I have an answer to that one. Google has only been tracking me since

I'll have to have a look and see what date "I went" to Carlisle and how I got there.

I have been watching my location history for some time. A couple of years ago I spent a day at the Great Dorset steam fair. As far as my location history was concerned I had spent most of the day in a field in Dorset with a couple of quick trips during the day to Liverpool.

I can only assume that the portable mobile mast being used at the GDSF had previously been used in Liverpool and was reporting a false location

- to Google at least if not to the telcos.

Other than that it has been pretty good.

If using location history on a PC the settings cog allows you to show raw data which comes complete with an error ring

And it also shows photos taken on the day!

I use mobile broadband for my internet connection. I don't have a smartphone, just a PC. I sometimes, but not often, log into Google; I have location etc, disabled. Generally Google thinks my location is London, sometimes maps etc seem to think I am elsewhere, but not Somerset which is where I am. In the summer I was in Italy, using my mobile broadband. A friend from Rome, who has an android smartphone with location on arrived in the village, and was rather surprised when his timeline location suddenly announced he was not only making a visit to Somerset but to the very hamlet where I now live.

Google's geolocation on a PC, and their geolocation on a phone are like night and day, the phone has numerous radios (gps, wifi, bluetooth, 3G) to locate you by, and the whole "fleet" of phones effectively act together to give pretty good results.

e.g. even if your phone has GPS turned off, someone else's phone is likely to have visited the same location with GPS enabled and reported what wifi access points are visible from there, so your phone reports what wifi it can see, and how strong their signals are, then google can generally work out where you are quite reliably.

Their location on my PC wanders wildly around the country, and I like that I'm not in their cross-hairs.