Twenty years of my location data

It’s two entire decades this month since I started recording my whereabouts with GPS receivers: approximately everywhere I’ve driven, biked, or run since 2006. Gathering a two decade corpus of location data seemed like a pretty fun side project for a young programmer in the aughts. It’s still fun for a graying programmer in our weird current 2026 timeline. And GPS is amazing space age magic.

Like most people with their senseless longtime hobbies, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about mine. Fun stories though.

Also I won’t be publishing more than trivial amounts of the data itself. It’s entirely too personal. One of the things you should take away from this series is that location data is insanely private data, fundamentally impossible to anonymize or to change, and it tells stories that are fun to look at for yourself but kind of alarming to think of creeps snooping around in, or selling copies of, which of course they do.

Here’s a rough outline, which I’ll fill out over the course of the next little while:

• My GPS receivers over the years
• Software and the last mile
• Data engineering: operations, backups, time zones, and unfixable gaps
• Maps and analysis (the fun part)
• Creepiness
• Usefulness (to me) at work