Google knows

Just a small part of Google data-harvesting practices.

Following the post by http://seasci.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/it-knows-where-i-live. I was amaze to know how much Google knows about me.

Get your info

If you use Google maps in your smart phone and you store your locations. This R code is for you. Just download the locations from Google Takeout and follow the code.

Once you have the location file

Save it in your hard drive \data\location\ in my case.

library(jsonlite)
library(plyr)
library(lubridate)
# Load in the raw data from the JSON file
raw = fromJSON ('data\\location\\HistorialdeUbicaciones.json')
# Get the 'locations' part of the list
locs = raw$locations
# these are all the columns that it contains...
names(locs)
# they're in various formats...
lapply(locs,class)

Do some simple processing

# Get columns into useful formats
ldf = data.frame(t=rep(0,nrow(locs)))
# time is in POSIX * 1000 (milliseconds) format, convert it to useful scale...
ldf$t = as.numeric(locs$timestampMs)/1000
class(ldf$t) = 'POSIXct'
# lat/lon are xE7, convert them to usable numbers...
ldf$lat = as.numeric(locs$latitudeE7/1E7)
ldf$lon = as.numeric(locs$longitudeE7/1E7)
# Get the map of your location
require(ggplot2)
require(ggmap)
DC = get_map(c(-77.05,38.93),11,source='google', color = "bw")

Making the map

ggmap(DC) %+% ldf + aes(x = lon, y = lat) +
  stat_binhex(data = ldf, aes(x = lon, y = lat),
                 size = 5, binwidth = c(.01,.01), alpha = 2/4) +
  scale_fill_gradient(low = "green", high = "red")  +
scale_alpha(range = c(0.00, 0.25), guide = FALSE) +
  theme(legend.position = "none", axis.title = element_blank(), text = element_text(size = 12)) +
  geom_point(data=ldf,aes(x=lon,y=lat), colour="blue", alpha = I(0.05))

The result

• Were I have been

It is clear:

• I spend much of my time in Silver Spring, MD
• I use the GPS of my phone sporadically, usually riding the red and green lines in the metro.

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