When I go for long walks or bike rides I like seeing the route and calculating my distance, and having that done automatically without having to remember to start logging it in advance each time.
It's also super useful when I can't remember which day I last went to the gym -- was it 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 days ago? And I can decide how important it is to go today.
I just find having a record of where I've been useful. And it's a cool visual diary of where I've been. I like having it stored in the cloud so it syncs across devices. And I don't consider Google to be my overlord, just a tool I use.
I think this is in part to google prompting you pretty much every time you use maps or other web tools to turn on location history for improved functionality. I think lots of people don’t understand that and just turn it on to remove the prompt.
Kind of frustrating as this could be done in a privacy preserving manner by keeping all location data local on device and overlaying it on the map locally. Functionality wise, google doesn’t need these data.
you say turn it off but how many people know that option even exists?