Comment by PaulRobinson

> Their recent move to make their location history / timeline product an on-device-only feature because they don't want to have to respond to law enforcement requests for user location data would seem to suggest they really would prefer to not have this sort of data.

I suspect that isn’t the motivation. GDPR says that you have to give users choices about data stored like this (including right to be forgotten, how it’s processed and used and so on), and this becomes a technical, legal and commercial nightmare very quickly. The easier route is just to get rid of it if you can.

This saves Google money (it likely wasn’t that useful to sell to advertisers), makes legal compliance a lot easier and de-risks them from very large fines.

I suspect that the EU lawmakers didn’t think about second order effects like making it harder for law enforcement to access this data in scenarios like this.