I do use Google timeline, more as an aide memoire more than anything else.
Looking over the timeline in response to a post someone had posted to our work Yammer site there was an anomaly.
It appeared that I had been to Austria.
It’s not that I’ve not been to Austria, I have. I travelled through Austria on my way to Slovenia in 1982 and 1985 and I distinctly remember not having my phone with me, mainly as I didn’t have a mobile phone back then.
I was reminded of the time when I downloaded the location data from my iPhone.
I was loving the fact that my iPhone has been to Darlington and Newcastle and I haven’t… I had downloaded the cell tower tracking data from my iPhone and it was interesting to see where it had connected to different towers.
So had my phone been to Austria? Google timeline said I had…
So delving into the data it would appear that I walked from the Jisc offices in 2017 to Weber & Trings in Austria.
I managed to walk 729 miles in just 13 minutes.
I also managed to walk 1456 miles in seven minutes.
Of course the reality was I had walked to Weber & Trings on the Christmas Steps in Bristol. Then at some point the IP address associated with Weber & Trings in Bristol had been assigned to somewhere in Austria!
Whatever entry in the geo-IP database that Google uses for this kind of thing was not updated so as a result I am one fast walker…