How to Find (and Delete) All Your Google Activity Data
It’s no secret that Google records your activities—in Chrome, on Google Maps, as you search the web —to serve ads more specifically targeted to you and your interests. It’s a trade-off we make for free use of all Google apps, but you have some control over what happens with that data.
Through your Google account ‘s online control panel, you can review all the information Google has collected about you across its many apps and remove some (or all) of it. You can even choose to have your data automatically deleted after a certain period of time if you don’t want your online activities to follow you forever.
Removing this data doesn’t mean you’ll see fewer ads on Google products, but the ads you see won’t be as targeted to you in terms of their content. If you don’t like targeted advertising, this is probably not a bad thing, and what’s more, the less of your data floating around, the better – regardless of whether it is somehow exposed or if someone else gets access to your account Google records.
How to View All Your Google Activity
In your Google online account dashboard, click Data & Privacy to view your Google activity, which is divided into three sections: Web and App Activity (where most of this information is stored), Location History (data about your location across all Google applications and services) and YouTube history , for which there is a separate section.
Google uses this data in a variety of ways beyond advertising. If you’ve recently viewed a particular coffee shop on Google Maps, it might show up the next time you search for a place to go, for example; or if you’ve watched a lot of clips of late-night talk shows on YouTube, this will be reflected in your recommendations.
Click on any of these three sections to view more detailed information. You can drill down to specific elements of your story, such as one Google search or one YouTube video. In the main app and web search activity feed, you can filter by date and Google product, so you can search for data logged by Gmail yesterday or Google Assistant on the same day last year.
You can search the list using the box at the top. For example, you can search for specific websites you’ve visited or specific apps you’ve used. Click any entry to get more detailed information about it, such as when the activity occurred, what device and platform you were using, and why the activity was recorded (for example, due to privacy settings in Google Chrome).
When viewing location history and YouTube history, you’ll see separate listings for Google Mapsandr YouTube. Google Maps shows you a timeline—all the places you’ve visited over the past months and years. Use the drop-down menus at the top to focus on a specific day (note that by the end of this year you will only be able to access this map on a mobile device ).
As for YouTube, you can see everything you’ve watched and listened to on both YouTube and YouTube Music – this overlaps with the history page on YouTube itself. As with the main Internet and Activity feed, you can search your history or jump to a specific date using the magnifying glass and calendar icons respectively.
How to Delete App and Web History on Google
Google gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to deleting all of this data, so you can choose how much of it you want to keep (for reference, Google’s full Privacy Policy can be found here) . Removing this data means the ads you see won’t be as targeted as they could be, but you’ll also miss out on potentially useful features like recently visited websites accessible from the URL bar in Chrome.
Under Data & Privacy, click Web & App Activity , and a drop-down menu will appear right at the top allowing you to immediately turn off all this tracking. There’s also the option to turn off tracking and delete anything Google has previously collected. You’ll see pop-up messages asking you to confirm your actions and information about how this will affect your experience in Google apps and services.
You have several other options to consider. One is to remove certain items from your activity history from the main list: Click the X next to any entry. Using the Delete button at the top of the list, you can also delete data for the last hour, last day, a specific date range, or since you first opened your Google account (so you can erase data without turning off activity tracking). ).
There is also a useful automatic deletion option; you can delete all this data after 3 , 18 or 36 months . You will be asked to confirm your choice and shown a preview of the data that will be deleted. Your data will be permanently deleted as it reaches the deadline you set.
How to delete YouTube history
Select YouTube History from the Data & Privacy screen. The setup and layout is similar to the Web & App Activity panel. You can disable YouTube’s data collection, delete the data currently collected (either specific sections or all of it), and set up an automatic deletion option for the same time periods.
How to Delete Google Location History
Tap Location History under Data & Privacy and you’ll get the same options again: turn off tracking, delete data Google has already stored, and turn on automatic deletion. To delete individual entries in this section, click Manage History . You can then select specific places on the map to remove them, or jump to a specific day using the options at the top.