I have been thinking about mapping my own personal history for some time, so I finally took a few minutes to download the past seven months of life, since I moved to Toronto. The files are extracted as monthly KML files from my personalized Location History portal. I then merged these into a single file in ArcMap. Because the track lines are fairly random at times, I transformed the vertices into points representing the exact locations where Google actually called home. This represented about 150,000 points (21,000 points per month or 700 points a day). I think this is a pretty awesome sample size, though it is not truly random since places I play with my phone are over represented, places my phone is turned off or underground are excluded, and places I run are excluded since I don't carry my phone. Here are all the raw data points and path lines for reference:
I also calculated a kernel density surface of the points to better represent the areas with many overlapping points. This map is below:
UPDATE: Here is another set of maps I created with one full year of location history data from Vancouver:
I would be happy to make a map of YOUR location history for a small fee if you are interested - all I need is a copy of your Google Takeout file in KML format that you can download from here. Please let me know if you have any questions in a comment below. I think it would be radical if I could automate this process and build an app so people could create their own custom history maps with the touch of a button - get in touch if you have any ideas about this!
