I consider myself a reasonably savvy internet user. I try to be careful about what I put online in the public view and what I keep private. When I was offered the option to turn off location tracking in Google, I did so. I only rarely post information about my whereabouts, and when I do, the timing usually doesn’t match with when I was there. So when people started posting links to the Google location tracking page lately, and showing how scarily accurate their location was being tracked, I just wrote it off as silly people who didn’t turn off location tracking in Google. For some reason, I decided to click on one of those links after seeing veteran WordPress developer Ajay D’Souza posting about it on Facebook. I was stunned to see a scarily accurate plot of my exact location published online by Google! I’m not sure how that happened; either Google screwed up, or more likely, I turned off location tracking in one place, but not another. For an example of how accurate the location tracking was, below is an exact map of a run I did in Oslo on September 15th 2013.

Google location view of run

View of my running route, as tracked by Google. Click the map to see the full page.

You can see how well Google is tracking your own location via their location tracking page.