Your iPhone stores a limited amount of information about where you have been.
What they save is called “Places of Interest” and you can see this data in the Settings app.
You can check your iPhone location history by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services > Places of Interest > then looking at the data there.
How to view location history on iPhone
- Click “Settings”.
- Select Privacy and Security.
- Select Location Services.
- Click System Services.
- Choose important places.
- View location history.
Our guide continues below with more information on how to check iPhone location history, including images of these steps.
Your iPhone stores some information about the history of the places you’ve visited.
This information is located in the Points of Interest list and is hidden tightly in the Privacy and Security menu on the device.
It’s not very specific and you can’t display a lot of data. In addition, the data is encrypted and cannot be read by Apple.
You can view this information at any time and even delete it.
Besides this information, there may also be some location data on your iPhone if you are using the Google Maps app.
We will discuss finding your iPhone location history for both options in the article below.
Related: If you don’t want your phone or any of its apps to use your location, you can read our article on how to disable location on iPhone.
How to find places of interest on your iPhone
The steps in this article were completed on an iPhone 13 running iOS 16. The same steps will work for most other iPhone models and iOS versions.
Step 1: Find the Settings icon on the home screen and touch it to open the menu.
Step 2: Scroll down and select “Privacy and Security” from the list.
Step 3: Tap on the Location Services button at the top of the screen.
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of this list and select the System Services option.
Step 5: Select the Places of Interest option.
Step 6: View a summary of the location saved on your iPhone.
If you want to delete the information here, you can click the Clear History button to do so.
Now that you know how to check iPhone location history, you can go back to this menu and view any information you want, and also clear that history if you want.
Tracking all locations on your device requires a specific setting to be enabled. If you go to the list of important locations and there is nothing there, you may need to follow the steps in the next section to turn on location services.
How to enable location services on your iPhone
When you went through the process of finding the important locations of your iPhone, you had to go through the Location Services menu.
This option can be disabled, although you need to do it manually.
If you don’t see any site, you may have stopped it at some point. You can use the following steps to turn Location Services back on your iPhone.
- I open Settings.
- Select Privacy and Security.
- Click on Location Services.
- Turn on location services.
If you use Google Maps, your phone may store additional information elsewhere. We will discuss this in the next section.
How to view Google Maps tracking history on iPhone
Google Maps users also have some location information stored on their iPhones, which is a bit more detailed than what you might see in the list of important locations we found in the section above.
Step 1: Open the Google Maps app.
Step 2: Click on your profile icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
Step 3: Mark your details on the cards.
Step 4: Select View and delete activity.
You may need to click the Continue button if you are viewing the Google Maps timeline for the first time.
Step 5: Select different dates to view the location history.
You can also choose from several taps at the top of the screen to see things like trips, places, cities, and more.
Additionally, if you tap the three dots at the top right of the screen, you can remove location data for certain data, adjust settings and privacy settings, and more.