Google is watching you. How can I prevent this and delete my data?

The fact that Google knows a lot about users has nev­er been a big secret. But more dis­turb­ing infor­ma­tion came to light last week. It became known that the com­pa­ny stores data about users’ loca­tions, even if they did­n’t give the go-ahead.

How­ev­er, in most cas­es, Google does not hide exact­ly what data about users it stores. But he does­n’t adver­tise. The col­lect­ed infor­ma­tion is avail­able for view­ing, but is often stored in com­plete­ly non-obvi­ous places.

In this arti­cle, we will talk about where you can find the data that Google has col­lect­ed about you, delete it and, if pos­si­ble, turn off track­ing.

His­to­ry asked

Per­haps this is the most obvi­ous fact for every­one. Google saves all your search his­to­ry. You can view and clear this his­to­ry on the page “My actions”. At the begin­ning, the search his­to­ry for today is dis­played. Below — for yes­ter­day and fur­ther ad infini­tum.

You can delete each request indi­vid­u­al­ly, or you can click “Select dele­tion option” in the left menu and spec­i­fy the date or peri­od for which you want to clear the search his­to­ry. Well, or choose “All the time” and, accord­ing­ly, get rid of the entire his­to­ry at once.

To dis­able his­to­ry log­ging, in the left menu, select “Activ­i­ty Track­ing”, and on the page that opens, turn off the “Web and App His­to­ry” option. This will dis­able the record­ing of not only search his­to­ry, but also activ­i­ties in the Chrome brows­er.

His­to­ry of voice requests

Less obvi­ous is that Google keeps all of your voice search his­to­ry. If you’ve ever used the Google Assis­tant, whether on a smart­phone, tablet, or inside a smart speak­er, then Google has a sam­ple of your voice. Most users do not even real­ize that they can lis­ten to any of their lines.

You can find them in the sec­tion “My activ­i­ties”> “Voice con­trol”. You can delete entries in the same way as you can delete search his­to­ry. And you can turn off the his­to­ry of voice requests on the page “Activ­i­ty Track­ing”. It is enough to turn off the “Voice con­trol his­to­ry” option.

Move­ment his­to­ry

In addi­tion to the his­to­ry of text search­es and voice queries, Google cap­tures the his­to­ry of the user’s move­ments. You can view your his­to­ry on the page “Chronol­o­gy”.

If you don’t like this track­ing, you can turn it off. here. To do this, turn off the “Loca­tion His­to­ry” option.

Adver­tis­ing set­tings

One of the most inter­est­ing places in your account is the “Adver­tis­ing pref­er­ence set­tings”. Here you can see some­thing like your “psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait”, which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­piled based on your search queries, YouTube views and oth­er activ­i­ty on the Inter­net. You will be sur­prised how accu­rate such a por­trait can be.

But we are pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of edit­ing this por­trait. If any of the inter­ests in the list seems wrong to you, you can click on this option and turn it off. You can dis­able the dis­play of adver­tise­ments from spe­cif­ic large adver­tis­ers, such as AliEx­press.

Final­ly, you can turn off the “Ad per­son­al­iza­tion enabled” option entire­ly. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, ads will not dis­ap­pear from this. But ads will no longer be per­son­al­ized because Google will no longer con­sid­er your inter­ests when show­ing them.

Account delet­ing

Well, if you are tired of Google and you do not want to work with the prod­ucts of this com­pa­ny at all, you can sim­ply delete your account. To get start­ed, take a look atPer­son­al Area”. It shows all the ser­vices that are accessed through a Google account. Please note that you will not be able to ful­ly use these ser­vices after delet­ing your account.

In chap­ter “Sav­ing data” you can upload all infor­ma­tion about your­self to your com­put­er hard dri­ve in a sin­gle archive. Well, after — you can final­ly delete accountcon­firm­ing this rad­i­cal deci­sion by enter­ing a pass­word.