Have you ever looked through your Google Account settings page?
Most people don’t know they can manage how Google treats their data, and by not making a choice, they leave it on the default setting. With data privacy becoming more of a hot topic, managing your Google profile is more relevant than ever.
Privacy
With online privacy being a hot topic in the past years, Google has responded by creating a privacy hub that lets you access, delete, and limit the data Google collects. Navigating the settings hub can be a bit confusing, and it’s not always clear what you’re giving Google permissions to do. Whenever you make a change that restricts Google’s tracking, Googles warns you it’s services won’t work as well without access to your data. This should be taken with a grain of salt.
Personal & Public information
This contains the basic information about you, your name, birthday, gender, password, email addresses, and phone number. Some of this is listed as public information, here’s how to see what the world sees about you:
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Login to your Google Account page.
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Choose Personal info from the menu bar to the left and review the information, you can change or delete what you wish.
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To see what information is publicly available, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Go to About me.
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Here you can see what information is publicly available for anyone to see, make changes or delete data.
Data & Personalisation
This is where Google stores the bulk of the data it collects about you. You can choose between disabling the service completely, stopping the data collection, or keep it enabled and choose how long it keeps your data.
If you choose to disable the services (as I did), you won’t get personalized results for things like search, maps, and YouTube. Most people won’t even notice the missing personalization with the services disabled, and for the price, you pay it’s not worth having it on.
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Login to your Google Account page and choose Data & Personalisation.
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Under Activity Controls, you can see all the data Google has collected about you grouped in different services.
Web & App Activity
How to disable the service and delete your data.
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Click Web & App Activity and then disable it by pushing the blue slider to off, it should say paused.
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Click Manage Activity.
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Click Delete activity by on the left side and choose Always in the popup windows, hit Delete and OK.
How to view and manage your data with the service enabled.
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Click Web & App Activity and then Manage Activity. This displays all the information collected since the day you created the account.
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To delete data collected about your activities, click Delete activity by on the left side. Choose an option you are comfortable with, deleting the last hour, last day, everything, or a custom range.
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To manage how long Google keeps this data in the future, select Choose how long to keep and pick the timeframe you feel most comfortable with.
Location History
How to disable the service and delete your data.
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Press Location History and then disable it by pushing the blue slider to off, it should say paused.
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Click Manage Activity.
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Click the trash can icon to the right and tick the I understand and want to… checkbox, then click Delete location history.
How to view and manage your data with the service enabled.
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Press Location History and then Manage Activity. This displays all the location information Google has collected on you as a timeline and a map.
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To delete all data collected about your location, click the trash can icon to the right and tick the I understand and want to… checkbox, then click Delete location history.
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To manage how long Google keeps this data in the future, click the gear icon and choose Automatically Delete Location History. Choose a timeframe that you feel comfortable with.
YouTube History
How to disable the service and delete your data.
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Press YouTube History and then disable it by pushing the blue slider to off, it should say paused.
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Click Manage Activity.
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Click Delete activity by on the left side and choose Always in the popup windows, hit Delete and Ok.
How to view and manage your data with the service enabled.
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Press YouTube History and then Manage Activity. This displays all the location information Google has collected on you as a timeline and a map.
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To delete data collected about your activities, click Delete activity by on the left side. Choose an option you are comfortable with, deleting the last hour, last day, everything, or a custom range.
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To manage how long Google keeps this data in the future, select Choose how long to keep and pick the timeframe you feel most comfortable with.