Thank you for posting this. I had no idea that there was a default off option to keep encrypted backups. I would be pretty mad if I lost all my years of timeline data because I switched phones. It's ridiculous that Google didn't even show an option for this in the long and needlessly convoluted migration process.
Google's handling of this "change" was disastrous. I also value my timeline data and would hate to lose it.
Google's solution was to force me to acknowledge some weird dialog that had minimal information about the impact. This is beyond asinine and I don't know how they can say they gave me any informed consent on the change - the whole thing is bizarre.
I took a screenshot, and left it running for a few hours while I stewed over it luckily. Then went and confirmed the "backup" of my timeline afterwards just to be sure. But who knows if this "feature" even works as before, even though it has my backups.
Side note. The solution to this is not to move my data to "the device" and off their servers. The solution should have been for them to open-source the service that handles this data, and make it a configurable first-class option in their location app.
it is outrageous invasion of privacy to keep constant tracking records of all locations over long periods of time, yet a user is outraged when they "lose" access to it?! Does a faith in personal access to data stores override any and all opaque backend practices of a massive company? like a cargo cult -- the company will return all of our precious data and we will be made whole
