Whichever app you use from Google: the tech giant follows you closely. If you want to prevent Google from looking over your shoulders, you can take some steps to protect your location data.
Even if you’ve turned off Location History in your Google account, the tech company will still find you. Some apps, including Maps and the Google search engine, can still estimate your location.
Google has been offering more options for a few years now to maintain control over the way in which your data is stored and when data is deleted. This way you can quite easily prevent Google from following you.
You can do this
Surf to Google.com on your smartphone or desktop, log in to your account, click on your profile icon at the top right and choose Manage your Google account. Click on the menu on the left Data and privacy and here you will find below History Settings the option Web & App Activity. Disable this option to prevent your activities from being saved on websites and apps. This includes all sites, apps, and devices you’ve signed in to with your Google account.
By the way, disabling the option does not delete previous data. You have to do this manually. Here you can see what data Google has about you. by on remove clicking you can delete the data. For example, choose activities from the past hour or all activities. In the latter case, you can specify which data you want to delete, for example from Chrome, Gmail or YouTube.
By turning off all these options, you prevent Google from collecting and storing all kinds of information about you. Google can no longer estimate your location, nor all the places you’ve been. If you want to use certain apps, including Maps, Google still needs access to your location. However, this information is no longer stored once you have completed the steps above.
Not just benefits
By the way, there are not only advantages to protecting your location data. Google can no longer serve you relevant ads, and searches may no longer yield the best results for you. Also, you will no longer get recommendations about places that are important to you. In short: the internet is becoming a lot more impersonal. Is that worth it to you? Then you can easily prevent Google from following you with the aforementioned steps.
Earlier this year it was announced that Google will block cookies in Chrome from 2022. Advertisements are then no longer shown on the basis of your surfing behaviour, but on the basis of a group of peers.
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