What location history shows
Open any Circle member's profile and tap History. You'll see their day drawn on the map as a route, with dots for every stop: when they arrived, how long they stayed, and when they left. Swipe between days to go back in time — 2 days on the free plan, 30 days with Premium, and 90 days with Premium+.
It's the feature that answers questions after the fact. Where did the afternoon go between school and dinner? Did dad's 'quick errand' really take three hours? When exactly did grandma get back from her walk? Instead of reconstructing the day from memory and texts, you scroll the timeline.
How the timeline is built
Throughout the day, each phone records location points using the same motion-aware engine that powers the live map. Overnight, FamilyTracking stitches those points into a readable story: trips become routes with start and end times, and clusters of points become named stops, matched to your saved places where possible — 'School, 8:02 AM to 3:15 PM' rather than a smear of dots.
Gaps are shown as gaps. If a phone was off or out of coverage, the timeline marks the missing stretch instead of guessing, and picks up again at the next confirmed point. You always know what the app knows — and what it doesn't.
Who can see history — and who controls it
History follows the same rule as everything else in FamilyTracking: only members of your Circle can see it, and every person owns their own data. Any member can delete a single day, a date range, or their entire history from their own device, instantly and permanently. Parents of young children can manage history settings for child accounts they administer.
There's no secret archive. When history is deleted, it's deleted from our servers too — not hidden from the interface while being retained behind the scenes. Our privacy page covers the storage details.
Why families keep it switched on
History sounds like a surveillance feature until you've used it for a week — then it becomes a logistics feature. It settles 'what time did we leave last year?' questions before holiday trips, documents a teen's commute pattern so you notice when a day looks different, and reassures adult children that an aging parent's routine is holding steady.
For new drivers, history pairs naturally with driving reports: the report says how the car was driven, the timeline says where it went. Together they turn a vague worry into a five-minute weekly review.
Everyday uses
- The after-school gap. See exactly where the hours between 3 PM and 6 PM went — usually the answer is 'the library and a friend's house', and now you know.
- Routine checks for elderly parents. A glance confirms mom's morning walk happened, without a phone call that says 'I'm checking on you'.
- Trip records. How long did the drive to the lake really take last summer? The timeline remembers so you don't have to.
- Lost-item retracing. A jacket left somewhere on Saturday is much easier to find when Saturday is drawn on a map.
- Pattern changes. When a teen's normal route quietly changes, the timeline shows it — a fact to ask about, calmly.
Stronger together: pairings worth enabling
No FamilyTracking feature lives alone — this one gets noticeably better next to the right neighbors:
- Geofencing & place alerts. Saved places give history its labels — 'School, 8:02–3:15' instead of anonymous coordinates — so the timeline reads like a diary, not a data dump.
- Driving safety reports. Reports say how the car was driven; history says where it went. Reviewed together, a teen's driving week takes five minutes to understand.
- Offline & last known location. Back-fill from offline periods lands in history automatically, so a no-signal hike still appears as a complete route by dinnertime.
The bottom line
History is the feature people expect to feel surveilled by and end up treating as the family's shared memory. Keep the free plan's 2 days if your questions are all about yesterday; take Premium's 30 when the questions span 'this month's bus pattern' or a teen's first job schedule. Skip nothing — it's already running, costs no extra battery, and its owner can erase it at will, which is exactly the balance of useful and deletable a family archive should have.