How to find your Google activity history and delete the data? Google knows a lot of things about us, yet this info is no more surprising to anyone. Part of the company’s effort is focused on collecting data from all users of its products. Android, Chrome or Google search engine are the main entry points for the company. But how much does Google really know about us? Today you are able to learn this in a very simple way. What may surprise you is the amount of information Google has about you.
How to learn what Google knows about you?
Google makes a setting available to anyone called Ad settings, and thanks to that, we can know exactly what information the company has about us. To access this section click here. Then log in with your Google account and the website will take you to a new section.
Within this section Google will show you all the information about your profile. It includes all the info the company has collected to date. Some data, such as age, place of residence, sex or civil status can be supplied by the users themselves through Android options. Others are extracted directly from the activity that we have maintained in Google through all its services.
Now we see data such as political position, the type of music we listen to, our favorite series and movies, the games we play, our favorite soccer team, our hobbies, favourite car brand, computer model and mobile phone…
The good news is that we can reset this information through Google options.
How can I delete the data Google has about me?
There are two ways to remove the information that Google has about us. The main and easiest way is to disable the personalization of the ads through the button that will be shown to us as we enter the web page linked above.
After disabling this option, Google will start showing us only general and less personalized ads. Advertising displayed after this point will be based on generic factors, such as search topic, time of day, or general location, but not about the searches we previously made. Because the data collected will be anonymized from this point on.
Another way to remove this information is to remove the interests one by one. Just click on the interests listed and then click on Deactivate. The difference from the previous method is that we will continue to see relevant ads, although with a less degree of success and unrelated to the interest we deleted.
How does Google obtain data about its users?
There is a very simple way to know how it acts based on our activity on the network, specifically through the My activity section, which we can access by clicking here.
Google will show you a history segmented by date and time with all our activity on the Internet. From a simple Google search to the opening of WhatsApp on our Android smartphone, through the download of applications and files and the playback of music through YouTube, it collects a lot of different data.
Likewise, the tool allows us to carry out a search by type of subject based on the date and time. We can also delete the trace of the activity through the Delete button that will be shown next to the activity in question.
