It
bugs me that Google seems to know so much about me and my online activities. Is
there some way to examine the information they’re storing about me?
Of course, it’s easy to joke about
this, and ponder the type of browsing history you might have that you wouldn’t
want Google (or your mother, perhaps) to know about, but the fact is that
Google does track a great deal of information about each of us and our online
activities. If you don’t have or use a Google account, there’s less information
that they can use, but for those of us who have Gmail accounts and use them
daily, storing bookmarks, searching the Web, viewing videos on YouTube, and
using other Google sites and applications, it’s pretty clear that Google knows
a lot about us.
If you want to limit the storage of
this information, and perhaps clear out an embarrassing YouTube search, should
anyone ever get information about your account, Google does provide tools that
make this easy. Assuming you have an active Google or Gmail account, browse to
myaccount.google.com. This site provides an account page that allows you to
look at things like your account history and your ad settings. You can control
your content, you can perform a privacy checkup to turn on and off various
features, and you can try out the security checkup to make sure your passwords
that you use with Google are all strong passwords. You’ll find a ton of useful
information at this site, and if you give it a little time, you can even weed
out searches and other online activities. For more information about the tools
available at myaccount.google.com, check out this article:
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