Get To Know What Data Google Has Stored About You With A Simple Google Search
It is common knowledge that Google knows a lot about us. You may have forgotten that emo phase of your life but Google probably still remembers. If you are just like most of us, then, you probably use Google services such as Gmail, Google search or even an android phone. The company collects the data of everyone using these or somewhat similar services in order to make these services better for the user.
If you take time to take a quick peek at Google’s privacy policy, it is clear that Google knows a lot about its users.
As an example, this is the general information that Google mostly has:
- Your name, gender and birthdate
- Your personal cell phone numbers
- Your recent Google searches
- The websites you have visited
- Your location history
- Your basic interests like games, music, etc.
- Where you work
- Where you live
- Your YouTube searches
Google makes it no secret that it collects the data about people in order to customize better target ads for each individual that has a Google account. In fact, some time ago, a TikTok user also pointed this out in his post and gained thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of views. This TikTok user with the handle @yorgoandlea posted a short video where she explained what people need to do to see exactly what Google knows about your travels and search activity. Users can Simply Google search for the text string “ads settings google”. This search will redirect the users to a page that displays the top categories that Google has found or that apply to you.
In a lot of cases, the information is found to be pretty accurate but that is not the case for everyone if we take the TikTok comments into consideration. Some users claimed that their age or demographic details, in general, were inaccurate, whereas others claimed that their interests noted by Google were nowhere close to their actual interests. Further down this list, people also saw categories such as pets, music, and flowers, along with some other categories that were pointless to the users.
Here is how the users can better understand Google’s perceived information about them and also choose to limit or turn it off:
Find the ad topics that interest you as per Google
Log into your Google Account and then Google search “Manage Ads Settings”, tap on the resulting Google page. This page will display the topics Google thinks you like. You can scroll down this page and see your demographic details along with ads you have blocked.
On the top of this “Manage Ads Settings” page, users will have the option to turn off “Ads Personalization”, they just have to tap that button.
Find out where Google thinks you’ve travelled
Google has a Location History service. When you go to Google’s Location History page, it displays a full guide of the places that the user has visited, along with their home and work locations. It knows almost everywhere I’ve been since 2010.
Users can tap on “Pause Location History” at the bottom of this page to limit Google’s access to your location history.
Review your Google Activity
Google saves the data on the voice actions when the user converses with Google Assistant, be it on a smartphone or Google Home, or even the sites that the user visited. You can go to Google My Activity page in order to access your history.
In order to limit this service, users can go to the “Google Web & Activity Page” and select “manage activity” in order to limit the information that Google stores.
These are some of the ways to limit the information and data that Google stores on a daily basis but this clearly does not constitute all the ways in which Google stores data.