Learn How to Delete Your Google Data Forever

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We all wish to believe that we are anonymous during our online sessions. That our searches are our business, and that our online actions and interests are private.

That, however, is not the case. Everything that you do online is known to your ISP unless you protect yourself with a VPN. But that is not all because there are also all those things that you Google, that are all getting recorded.

In fact, Google has so much data about you in store, that it probably knows you much better than your own family and friends. They don’t only monitor your search history, but also any action that you take. Especially if you are using their own free services.

Google is everywhere, and you can’t do anything online that this company won’t record. However, in order to do that, they also need to give you a choice, and the option to stop them from doing it.

This means that you have all the rights to delete their entire database that concerns you. The trick is how to find it and how to do it yourself. Well, you are about to find out, and all you need to do is keep reading.

Should you do it?

If you have privacy concerns and you don’t like others to know about what you do online, that is perfectly normal. You don’t have to have a part in criminal activities, or some similar issues, to want your privacy safe. You have full right to want anonymity online, and nobody would think twice about it if you make a decision to delete this data.

But should you really do it? True, Google is collecting a ton of info about you, your YouTube searches, your Android data, your entire browsing history, and alike. However, they are not collecting this data in order to blackmail you or to achieve some ultimate goal. They collect it in order to make your experience better.

Sure, you will still get ads. But finding what you need, want, and have an interest in is much easier. This is because Google already knows what you might look for, at some level. If you delete this data, you will become a stranger, and you will have to work hard in order to find content that interests you.

If you leave it alone, you will get all of it with ease, in form of recommendations. This doesn’t only include your favorite topics, news, games, shows, and alike. It may have an impact on traffic notifications that you receive before work, or plane tickets notifications that you receive via email.

So, the choice is hard, and you should not make it lightly. Leaving this data will result in your convenience. Deleting it will increase your privacy. The choice is yours, but you have to think long and hard before doing it.

How to access this data

Accessing the data that Google has on you is pretty simple if you know where to look. Simply go to Google’s history page, and all of the information connected to your account will be presented.

Here, you will find many different sections. Those include web and app history, voice and audio activity, device information, location history, and both, YouTube watch history, as well as search history.

Check them out yourself, and you will probably find a lot of things that you might find interesting. By simply browsing through this place, you will see just how much Google actually knows about you.

How to disable recording of this history

If you don’t wish to completely delete your entire history, you can only disable it and prevent future recording. Here is how to do that:

  • Go to the Google history page
  • Select the data sections that you wish to disable
  • In the top right corner, click on the three dots
  • Click on Settings
  • Find ‘Your searches and browsing activity’, and hit the switch next to it
  • You will see notification about the impact your actions will have
  • You can read the entire notification after you click Pause
  • The process is pretty much the same for every section that you want to shut down

How to delete the search history

If you decide that you want to delete this history forever, without the choice to return it in any way, you can do that as well. Do it by following these instructions:

  • Go to the Google history page
  • Select the data sections that you wish to delete
  • In the top right corner, click on the three dots
  • Click on ‘Delete options’
  • Here, you can choose if you want to delete data from today or the day before. There are also advanced settings that will allow you to delete the past four weeks, or even ‘All time’
  • Select what you want to get rid of, and hit Delete
  • Confirm the decision
  • And repeat the process for everything that you want to delete

Conclusion

Having Google record all that you do is seen as a privacy breach by many, and they might feel relieved to find out that they can delete such info.

Doing it is easy, and you can find all the instructions to do it in this guide. Hopefully, you will manage to do it on your own now, and it will help you feel more secure now.

Passion for Cyber Security and Technology.

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