Delete Personal Activity Information Collected By Google
Your personal activity has being tracked by Google and the giant knows more about us than even our closest friends and relatives. Google is pretty much everywhere.
They also allowed you to delete what they know about you, if you so choose. In this post we will show you how you can delete google history.
Google’s Web and App history keeps tabs on all your personal activity all the way back to 2005 and lets you download all your past searches.
You have a lot of options to tweak Google tracking to suit your needs.
Navigate to myactivity.google.com to access the dashboard that contains your personal information. Google will show you a short tutorial that explains how they track your activity and some basic information.
There are multiple sections in this page:
- Web & App History
- Voice & Audio Activity
- Device Information
- Location History
- YouTube Watch History
- YouTube Search History
If you want to delete ALL your history, you must repeat the process for each category. You must delete data from the Web & App History, then delete it from the Voice & Audio Activity and etc.
How to delete Personal Activity from Google history?
In addition to being able to delete Google’s existing information, you can manage the way they handle your personal information in the future.
- Go to the Google history page from any browser.
- Click on the data section you want disabled.
- Select the 3-dot menu button located on the top-right corner of the page.
- Select “Delete options.”
- You can pick whether you want to delete data from today or yesterday. Selecting “Advanced” will allow you to delete the past four weeks of activity. All trace of information to disappear you can choose “All time.”
- Make your selection and click “Delete.”
- Confirm your selection.
- Repeat the process for each of the sections you want to delete.
Disable your Google history
In addition to being able to delete Google’s existing information, you can manage the way they handle your personal information in the future.
- Go to your Google history page from any browser.
- Click on the data section you want disabled. (e.g. Location History).
- Select the 3-dot menu button located on the top-right corner of the page.
- Select Settings.
- You will find a switch next to Your searches and browsing activity. Turn it off.
- You will get a warning telling you some information about what this action may cause.
- Select “Pause” if you still want to go through with this.
- Repeat the process for each of the history sections you want to disable. Or from any of the Settings pages, select “SHOW MORE CONTROLS” and toggle them all off.
Google does provide the ability to better maintain your privacy. If you have a Google account to use services like Gmail, YouTube, or any others, you’re being tracked.
The Activity Tool is a great way to ensure that you have control of the way that the company manages your personal data.
Google released new controls that will allow you to set Google to erase its collection of location data on your every 3 months or every 18 months, depending on your preference.
Permanently deleting your Google web, app and browsing history, personal activity information can increase your privacy, but it does come with drawbacks. These settings are designed to give you the best user experience based on your searches, saves and preferences, in addition to targeting you with advertisements.
Once your history is deleted and/or disabled, you’ll get much broader search results. Your favorite websites might no longer appear at the top of Google search results, or even on the first page.
Deleting or disabling your history won’t make you “invisible” for Google. You can’t go totally off the grid and still use Google, but you can stay more on top of your privacy by monitoring and managing your Google Activity hub.
If you found this article useful, check out related iTechFixes articles in the Privacy section.
