Is Google’s surveillance creeping you out? Here’s how to change that.
After the GDPR came into force and the public backlash after several revelations of the abuse of personal data committed by Google, the spotlight fell on the Californian online giant’s privacy controls. The tool has been available for quite some time now and they have been updating it regularly (either through outside pressure or by their own initiative).
It is now fairly easy to control which data Google stores (the question remains whether these controls really do what they say they do) and in this blog we’ll give you a detailed walkthrough on how to change your Google account privacy settings to make your experience more private.
Let’s get started.
Account control board
Sign into your Google account.
You’ll be taken to a three-part control board like the one in the picture below. Before you start diving into privacy settings, you might first want to take a look at the “Sign in & security” column on the left. Choose the “Apps with account access” option.
If you’ve ever signed into anything with your Google account, it should be there. Click on the “Manage apps” option and then simply remove those that you don’t want to have access to your account anymore.
Dig into privacy controls
OK, back to the main stuff. The three-part control board offers a condensed view of what each part includes. So when you click on the “Personal info & privacy” column you’re greeted with a huge interface that contains the same topics as on the previous page (that can be seen on the left), with some added options.
First, you’ll see the Privacy Check-up and My Activity options (see picture below). Beneath those two you have several other options:
- Your personal info: This one manages your personal information like name, email, birthday, phone number, info other people see about you etc.
- Contacts: This one is easy and straightforward.
- Manage your Google activity: This is basically the same as clicking the My Activity option at the beginning of the page. It has fewer options, however, and some are more prominently featured like Activity controls, Review activity and Google Maps timeline. The added value is the dashboard that lets you see all the Google apps you’re using and their current state.
- Ad Settings: Here you can turn off personalization of ads and sign out of 100+ other online ad networks.
- Control your content: This one allows you to download the complete archive Google has on you and assign a trustee to have access to your account.
Privacy Check-up
When you click on the Privacy Check-up option it will take you to a menu with five options:
- Personalize your Google experience
- Manage what you share on YouTube
- Manage your Google Photos settings
- Choose what Google+ profile information you share with others
- Make ads more relevant to you
1. Personalise your Google experience
Setting privacy controls here can beconfusing until you really take some time to make sense of it. Everything that you do here can also be done in My Activity and if you click the bottom blue-coloured “MANAGE …” link it will take you to My Activity. We really recommend you click on the “Learn more” links since they offer a lot of helpful additional information.
The Personalise your Google experience section has six sub-categories and each sub-category has a blue-coloured status next to its name (see picture below).
If you click on it, it will take you to that specific activity controller where you can either turn it on or pause it (not turn it off, hopefully that’s just semantics). By default everything is on and the explanations are written just for what the “On” option does. And, of course, it is all positive.
Here are the six sub-categories:
1. Web & App Activity
This one stores all your searches and activity for sites that use Google services. If you don’t want your search history and interaction with apps stored, turn it off. Associated Press also revealed in August 2018 that if you don’t want your location tracked you need to turn Web & App Activity off as well; turning off location alone is not enough. Google admitted to that only after being exposed.
2. Location History
This option tracks all your locations and stores all location searches you have made. Google says that with this option on they “will create a private map of where you go with your signed-in devices, including how long and how often you visit, and how you travel between places”. Since we have our phones on us, online, most of the time it is like being equipped with a GPS tracker. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, remember to turn off the Web & App Activity as well.
3. Device Information
This gives Google your device and app information. It stores data such as contacts, calendar info, music, whether the screen is on, battery level, which apps you have installed, Bluetooth and WiFi quality, sensor readings etc. It’s not as innocuous as it seems.
From this Google can accurately profile you by which apps you use and how often you use them, how many times a day you look at your screen and how much you use your phone through battery drain. It can see through sensor readings which other devices you connect to and what kind of environment you live in .
4. Voice and Audio activity
When you make a voice search it is recorded and stored, just like a regular typed search. Google analyzes these recordings for better speech recognition and to serve you personalized ads. Audio can be saved even when your device is offline.
5. YouTube Search History
This one is pretty self-explanatory. It saves your searches, the same as it does in Google’s search engine, and every search influences the recommendations YT makes for you, creating a search bubble.
6. YouTube Watch History
Similarly to search history, this option saves videos you have already watched and influences future recommendations.
The other four options are less impactful, but you should review them anyway. They include the things you share on YouTube, removing geolocation tags when you share photos via a link (but not in the photos themselves), Google+ settings (if anyone even uses it anymore) and ad settings. This last one can also be managed on the start page of Personal info & privacy, so there’s nothing new here.
Manage your activity
So, that was for the Privacy Check-up. You might wonder then what does My Activity do. Pretty much the same thing, only it is more detailed. When you click on My Activity it will take you to a page where you can see all of your activity on Google.
As you can see from the print screen, you have several options on the left.
- If you choose Bundle view it will give you all your activity from all the six points listed in Personalise your Google experience. You can filter them using Item view.
- You can also delete ALL your activity from time immemorial, or some of it from a custom period that you can choose. Your interface will then look like in the print screen above.
- Then there’s Other Google activity. Here you have additional data that Google saves concerning you. From YouTube comments, Place answers, surveys, subscriptions…
- If you click on Activity controls, it will take you to the same activity controls as at the top of the Personal info & privacy page and in Privacy Check-up (the difference from the latter is that this time all six of them are in one place).
It seems that the folks at the online giant have deliberately made some confusing user experience decisions just to keep people from using privacy controls. It wouldn’t be the first such move.
It is good to be aware that changing the settings will affect your experience. For instance, if you turn off location tracking, the good news is the guys from Mountain View won’t stalk your every move. However, you will lose the ability to easily find all the places you navigated, the locations you were previously looking for etc. If you don’t care about user experience that much, turn everything off. But if you do, then it will take some time and tinkering around to find a setting that’s best for you.
That’s it.
