Gadgetory

Google Maps can now help you keep track of yourself I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNET update Google may know every place you've ever been and what you've been doing at those places now if that sounds shocking to you well then you haven't been paying attention to how Google collects your data for a long time now Google has been able to keep track of your location history if you had the option turned on and if you do have location tracking activated now Google makes it easy for you to see your travel history and a feature called your timeline it shows the places you've been and you can jump down to a specific day and see your journey as well as what photos you took on that day that is if you use the Google Photos app you can also rename some places as mom's house or doctor's office all this information is for your eyes only and you can turn off location history or even delete specific days or all of your history the feature is rolling out now but you can control your settings in Google Maps on the desktop just go to maps.google.com / location history and I should say tracking some location has its perks if you use Google now it can alert you when traffic is congested on your typical route home or it can show you search results tailored to your location which is helpful when searching for a place to eat nearby in addition Google is making a big change to the Google Plus network the Google Plus photo backup service is retiring on August 1st and it's being replaced with a separate Google Photos app that launched in May but here's what's important to know if you uploaded photos to Google Plus they are safe but you'll need to do a few things to access your photo backup you can download the new Google Photos app and it'll all move over to that new app or you can also export your library using the Google takeout service which lets you download a copy of all your data saved on Google and if you don't want to do that you can still view your library on the web at photos google.com and there's more Google News this time involving email Google says it's testing a way for Gmail users to create their own custom Gmail addresses so instead of saying at gmail.com it's at your company com or at your name com it would cost you $2 a month for your personal account and nice users would be charged $5 a month for extra storage and other tools $10 a month gets you unlimited online storage along with some other features but google says is just a test for now it may not be an official thing in the long term and speaking of email Microsoft just launched a new email chat app on the iPhone it's called sent and it's similar to Facebook Messenger but only people with Outlook in office 365 business and school email accounts can sign up to chat on it Microsoft said it will expand availability in the coming months it's a way for you to chat with all your co-workers or your classmate email contacts without having to know all of their cell phone numbers microsoft says it's coming soon to Windows Phone and Android that's it for this tech news update there's more at cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey