Future of Google Location History API

Question

Google will be retiring Latitude soon, along with Latitude\'s API. But they say on their blog that Location History will still be stored and users will be able to access the

Answer 1

In case you want the data as JSON with accuracy and not just the locations, you can just make the same request that the website makes. Looking at the inspector shows that it makes a request to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/apps/pvjson?t=0. You can replay the same request with cURL (or any other way to make a POST request).

curl 'https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/apps/pvjson?t=0' -H 'origin: https://maps.google.com' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'x-manualheader: [SOME STRING]' -H 'accept-language: en-GB,en;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,de;q=0.4,pt;q=0.2' -H 'cookie: GDSESS=[COOKIE DATA]' -H 'x-client-data: [ANOTHER STRING]' -H 'user-agent: [UA STRING]' -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8' -H 'accept: */*' -H 'cache-control: max-age=0' -H 'referer: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0' -H 'dnt: 1' --data '[null,[BEGIN],[END],true]' --compressed

I left out my private cookie data and some details (in [..]) but you can google chrome ask to generate this for you in the developer console (right click on request -> copy as cURL). Just adapt the begin adn end times and download your location history as JSON. However, you need to download ranges of a couple of days and not everything at once. I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.