About presence sensing and how to manage your data

Your devices use presence sensing to start either your Home routine or Away routine. You can view and manage your presence data in the Home app.

If you turn off presence sensing for your home and your phone, your routines and other features that use presence sensing won't know when you leave or come back home, so they won't know when to start. You can still start your routines manually with the Home app.

If you turn off ‘Allow this home to use phone locations’, but leave your individual phone location on, Home and Away routines will stop working, but features that use only your phone location such as Only ring when home will continue to work.

Your devices use presence sensing to determine if you're home or not. When 'Only ring when home' is enabled, incoming calls to your Google Nest speakers or displays will occur when your phone is at home, but not when your phone is away from home. You can view and manage your presence data in the Home app.

If you're a member of a home that has Home and Away routines enabled, turning off presence sensing for your phone in the Google Home app's settings can also disable other features that use your phone's location with presence sensing like only ring when home.

If you opt-in, the Home app will use your phone's location to figure out when you've crossed over your geo-fence, a virtual perimeter around your home that you designate when setting up a feature that uses presence sensing for the first time.

Your geo-fence crossings, combined with sensors on devices in your home, can determine when to start your Home and Away routines. This data also helps improve and personalise your Nest-connected home experience. Learn more in the Nest privacy FAQ.

For the geo-fence to enable presence sensing to work properly, you'll need to make sure that:

• You've set up Home and Away routines in the Home app
• You've enabled your phone in presence sensing settings in the Home app
• You've set location permissions for the Home App on your phone to Always on
• Everyone in your household has enabled their phones in presence sensing settings in the Home app on their own phones

In your Home app's history, you'll see an indication for every time that you entered or left the geo-fence area. Remember that presence sensing is distinct from the Location History feature of your Google Account, and neither feature impacts the other one.

The Home app doesn't track where you are or where you've been beyond tracking whether or not you are inside your home's geo-fence. Data used for presence sensing and geo-fence is only used to determine when you come home or when you leave. This data is used for the purposes for which you give permission, and is explained in more detail in the Nest Privacy FAQs.

Presence sensing works best if every member of your household enables their individual phones in presence sensing settings in the Home app. If some members of your household don't use these settings, your devices may not sense that person as being home, even when they are, and your routines may not work like you expect them to.

For example, if you're the only person in your household whose phone is enabled in presence sensing, and your home doesn't use any other devices for presence sensing, when you leave, the Away routine will start and turn off the lights in your home. The other members of your household still at home would need to turn the lights back on or manually start your Home routine.

You can also turn off just an individual phone from being used for presence sensing.

If you turn off sharing phone locations for a home or just your phone in the presence sensing settings, features that use presence sensing, such as 'Only ring when home' or Home and Away routines may no longer work.

The Home app history will show you and other home members when and why your Home and Away routines started automatically.

• You can see your own arrivals and departures to the home. You can manage this data in the Home app settings.
• Other members of your home can see when you manually change the mode to Home or Away using the app, your voice or Nest x Yale lock.

Note: All data collected by the Home app is subject to the Google privacy policy and is handled as explained in more detail in the Nest privacy FAQs. Please also read Google's commitment to privacy in the home.

Delete presence sensing history

Your home's presence history includes data for all members of your home and all your devices, even the data that you can't see in your home's history in the Home app. It's stored for 60 days and then it's deleted automatically. You and all other members of the home can also delete it manually at any time from the Home app.

Note: You can only see your own history for when you leave or come home. Only those who have set up Home and Away routines can delete the home's presence sensing history in the Home app.

1. Open the Home app .
2. Tap Settings .
3. In the "Home features" section, tap Presence sensing.
4. Tap Delete all presence history.
5. Choose Delete.

After you delete your home's presence history, you and all members of your home can see the deletion event in your home's history.

Download your data

You can see a history of data collected by your devices in the Home app. You can also download your data at any time.

Learn more about how to download your Google data.