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That includes 'activity' settings, profile information and personalised advertising if you've got a Google account, get a cup of tea (or something stronger) and spend half an hour going through each and every control. Google's default settings favour data collection rather than personal privacy, but the company has made it easier to consider your settings on the Data & Personalisation page with the Privacy Checkup, which walks you through a set of questions regarding your settings. Now that you've got a sense of the epic scale of data being collected, it's time to do something about it.

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How to clean up your Google account settings If you think Google is leaving something out, or has more data on you it's not willingly revealing, you can also file a subject-access request, which is a right enshrined in EU law to find out what data any organisation holds on you. Google notes that if you search on Maps for 'football fields near me' or watch match highlights on YouTube, it can put two and two together that you're a football fan.Įyeing up Takeout, Dashboard, and your personal and advertising profile, you'll get a good sense of the epic mountain of data Google is accumulating about who you are, where you go, and what interests you. Such behavioural advertising can be more sophisticated than that.

Google uses the data it collects to build an advertising profile, making its money via ads – Google's parent firm Alphabet posted ad revenue of $32.6 billion last quarter – not by directly selling your data, but through letting companies personalise their advertisements this is why that pair of trainers you’ve been coveting keep following you around the web. You can't simply delete this data, but if you want to obfuscate you can of course enter false information – just remember you've done so in case you need that information for password resets.

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Under the menu, head to 'Personal Info': on this page, you can see what information Google makes public about you and update information such as your photo and birthdate. If you want to freak someone out, show them their location timeline, where Google Maps keeps track of everywhere you go and when, alongside the photos taken that day and travel times down to the minute.Īnother source of Google data is your personal profile, held in your Google Account. That includes the number of email exchanges you've had in Gmail, number of files in Drive, and how many photos Google stores for you, but the key information is what Google dubs 'activity data', such as your location or searches or browsing history.

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Building the Takeout archive can take a few days to create, with Google sending you a link to download when it's ready.ĭashboard was designed with data management in mind, offering a snapshot of the data Google collects about you as you use its services.

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Takeout was created to let users grab their data from Google and shift it to another service, beginning with photos and contacts but since expanding to Android device settings, Chrome bookmarks, Google Fit activity data, and even your Cloud Print history.

There are two ways to get a copy of all the data Google collects on you: Takeout and Dashboard. It's the cost of getting so many services without spending any money, but there are ways to limit what Google collects about you. Want to stop Google from knowing anything about you? That’s nigh-on impossible: the advertising giant collects data every time you search the web, every time you visit a website, every time you use your Android phone – you name it, Google is using it to collect data about you. But you can wrestle back some level of control. Google tracks you on and off the web in a myriad of ways – that's no surprise.

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