Google Maps show location history where I've never even been I have a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime and it has Google Maps downloaded on it as well as other Google apps. My husband went through my phone and in the Google Maps app, under timeline, apparently it showed that I had actually went to several places on days when I had never left the house, but the worse part is that it's saying I've been to places I've never even been.

This whole situation is frustrating because I love my husband very much but now he is completely convinced that I'm cheating on him, and I'm not; there has to be someone out there that can explain this total mess cause my husband doesn't believe a word I say.

Please help me figure this mess out and convince my husband that I'm not lying and in definitely not cheating!
There are many possible reasons that places could show up inaccurately in the Google Maps tracking.


If your device is indoors, it will not have a good GPS signal (or possibly have no GPS signal at all) and will have to use less accurate location methods. Each of those methods has problems, some of which are discussed below.
If your device is trying to locate itself using WiFi networks (now called "WiFi Positioning System" or "WiPS" for short), it looks for nearby WiFi networks that Google knows about and then uses the locations that Google has on record for those networks as a way to determine your approximate location.  However, that means that if someone from a particular area moved into your area and Google has not updated their database, then Google's database will think that you are in the area where that person's WiFi network used to be.
If your device is trying to locate itself by searching for nearby cellphone towers, it could determine that it is anywhere in a large area in which those towers can be detected. The effective range of a cell phone tower could be anything between 1 and 45 miles, depending on how dense your area is.  That means that the numbers could be up to that far off if they only came from cell tower data.
Even if you do have a good GPS signal, Google will sometimes "snap" your location to a nearby "point of interest" if you drive by.  I don't know exactly how far away this snapping can happen, but I have seen it make some pretty bad guesses.


Here's one extreme example that I just read about: People keep going to this home looking for their lost phones and nobody knows why.

In the end, the fact is that the location-tracking systems available on consumer devices today are not that accurate.  I worked from home today because of the "Snowzilla" blizzard on the US East Coast, and left home twice to go to the library and run one errand, but my location history shows me being up to a mile further away from home than any of the locations which I visited. (I am actually working next door to a research group at the University of Maryland that is working on more-accurate location technologies, but it will be a while before any of them are on the market.)