Hide your home before you share a travel video — one free switch

Travel videos made from your Google Maps Timeline are fun to post — and they have one obvious problem. Every trip in the video starts and ends at the same place: your home. Pause the clip, screenshot the frame, open a map app, and a stranger has your street. The same goes for the place you go to every weekday.

People sharing these videos have been warning each other about this in comments for a while ("check the start point before you post!"). Since 24 August 2026, Timeline Visualizer handles it for you, for free.

What the privacy zone does

Turn on Hide home & frequent places (under Advanced in the settings) and the tool:

1. Finds your two most-visited places — usually home and work — from the file itself. The detection runs in your browser; nothing about your file leaves the device.
2. Pushes every point inside a circle around each place to the circle's edge. You choose the radius: 1, 3 or 10 km. The route still visibly leaves and returns, but it enters and exits a blurred zone instead of a doorstep.
3. Shifts the circle's centre by 100–250 m in a direction that is random but stable for your file. This is the part that matters: without it, anyone could fit a circle to the blurred points and read the exact centre — your address — straight off the video. With the shift, the centre of the circle is a spot 100–250 m away from anything real.

How to use it

1. Load your file, open Advanced at the bottom of the settings.
2. Switch on Hide home & frequent places and pick a radius. 1 km hides the street; 3 km hides the neighbourhood; 10 km hides which part of the city you live in.
3. Tap Preview and drag the scrubber to the very start and the very end — that is where your home would have been. Check that the route now stops short of it.
4. Export as usual.

What it does not do

• It hides places, not trips. Someone can still tell you went to Bali; they cannot tell where in your city you came home to.
• If you live in a small town, a 1 km circle still reveals the town. Use 10 km.
• It only works on places that repeat. A hotel you stayed in for two nights is not "frequent", so it stays visible — which is what you want for a travel video.

A note on the original project

Timeline Visualizer is based on the open-source google-timeline-visualizer project. As of 25 August 2026, a "safe sharing mode" for private locations is being prototyped there (issue #66) but has not shipped; if you use the original app, check the start point manually before posting.