Sunday, July 7, 2024

I'm in the wrong Google Timeline

I like checking out my Google Timeline (the link, of course, will take you to yours, not mine).  It's neat to see where I've been, and how far I've traveled, and the patterns as they change over time.  I suppose I should be worried that Google is building a profile of me, but if I genuinely cared about that sort of thing I'd get a second, dumb phone.  They're cheap enough, especially as a pay-as-you-go thing.

I was going back over my timeline the other day, and noticed something extremely off.  A few weeks before that I'd visited my massage therapist's office, and in the interim she'd moved to a new location. The old map from before the move was showing that I'd driven to the new location instead of the old one.

This... seemed like a bug, and I said so. I got a very earnest "Diamond Product Expert" telling me it was an either-or situation and an unsolvable problem. I remembered I'd seen this before when a beloved sandwich shop (Sub Conscious) closed and all of a sudden seemed to be located approximately halfway between Seattle, Washington and Portland Oregon but also a couple hundred kilometers West into the ocean...

 

I'd love to think this new location has something to do with submarines instead of sandwiches, but I've usually found edge cases like this simply to be manifestations of garbage in the system.

Anyway, this is emphatically not an unsolvable problem. Google can save historical data about location and the businesses/points of interest/whatever at that location.  They know when things move and they save that data and move on.  It's not a huge space concern because THEY'RE ALREADY SAVING ALL THIS OTHER DATA.  I'll also bet you real folding money that if "Home" moved this would not happen.

It's just a problem they choose not to because it doesn't fit their business plan. That's it, and it's ok to admit that rather than try and fabricate some theoretical technical reason.


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