How to find and delete everything Google knows about you and your movements

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Get rid of spies on your phone.

If you have Google apps installed on your smartphone, this means that the search giant is constantly monitoring your movements. Even if you turned off GPS and location history recording in settings.

This was noticed by several security researchers at once after pop-up messages appeared asking them to rate the places they had visited earlier. You yourself have probably received such questions and suggestions.

Basically, there is nothing wrong with the fact that Google collects personal information by providing additional services in return. It is simply an exchange of information, in which each of the parties gets its own benefit. But the problem is that in this case, users deliberately turned off geolocation, so as not to share their travel history with Google. However, the company continued to track them. This is a dishonest deal.

It turns out that disabling tracking in the settings does not turn off the recording of location history at all, as it would be logical to assume. In fact, you also need to go to your account settings and deactivate all the switches in the "Activity tracking" section. This can be done both through the web interface and in the settings of the Google application on the phone ("Settings" → "Google" → "Google account" → "Data and personalization").

And if you still doubt whether it is worth doing, then look at the information already collected about you. To do this, click on the "Manage History" links on the "Data and Personalization" page. Here you will find the history of your movements on the Web and in real life, a list of search queries, a list of visited sites and running applications, a record of voice queries. In general, a detailed diary of his entire life.

Any record can be removed from the history. To do this, click on the icon with three dots near its title and select the "Delete" item. There is also a tool for mass deletion of records according to the parameter you specify. For example, for a certain period of time or collected by a separate application.

However, this does not give any guarantee of the final and irrevocable disappearance of the dossier collected on you. We will not be surprised if the information is simply hidden from the outraged user, but continues to be quietly stored somewhere on Google's servers.