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- You can prevent Google from tracking some aspects of your online activity by changing your Google account settings.
- Google tracks a lot of details about you every time you use your Google account on your computer, laptop, tablet, and phone.
- Here’s how to stop Google from tracking your web activity, location, YouTube history, and more.
- Visit the Business Insider Technical Reference Library for more stories.
Google has found its way into virtually every aspect of your life, and the search giant’s network of interrelated applications and services captures, shares, and relies on a great deal of personal information about you. Google tracks your search history, for example, as well as the location of your mobile device, the ads you see, the videos you watch, and more.
If you prefer, you can set Google to stop tracking you, at least for the most part, although if you do, you lose the benefit of all Google’s personalization features.
How to prevent Google from tracking you
No matter what device you are using, you can disable most of Google’s various tracking features:
On an iPhone, you can easily disable Google location history tracking. Read our article on how to disable Google tracking on an iPhone.
On an Android phone, you can disable Location History and location tracking for your entire device or individual apps. Read our article on how to disable Google tracking on Android devices.
In a computer, you can disable Google from using your Google account settings in a web browser. Read our article to learn how.
What you need to know about Google tracking on your accounts and devices
Regardless of how you choose to disable Google’s tracking features, you generally use the same Google account settings. For the most part, Google tracks you based on your account, not your device, so if you disable Google tracking through your Web & App Activity or Location History settings, it will turn off tracking on every device you use. that specific google account.
There is one major exception: in the Location History settings, you can click “Devices on this account” to see all the phones and tablets that are being tracked. You can choose to uncheck any of those devices to prevent Google from tracking you. This allows Google to track some of your activity, but not all of it.
You can selectively remove specific devices from Google’s list.
Dave Johnson / Business Insider
Similarly, you can deny specific permission from Google apps to access your phone’s location services; This prevents Google from tracking your location even if you leave Location Services turned on for other devices.
On your phone, you can use permissions in the Settings app to deny Google apps the ability to know your location.
Dave Johnson / Business Insider
Google tracks other data that you can also disable
In addition to web activity and location tracking, Google also tracks other data, in particular your YouTube viewing history and details about you that inform the ads you see online. You can see more details about both on the Data and Personalization page in your Google account settings.
To disable YouTube tracking, read our article on how to stop tracking on your computer.
The Ad Personalization section of the Data and Personalization page displays a wealth of information about what Google knows about you and how it applies to the ads you receive. If you want, you can disable ad personalization entirely (click the button to slide it to the left), but it only affects the ads you see; it does not reduce the number of ads you receive or prevent Google from continuing to collect information about you.
If you find that some of the personalization information about you is incorrect, click an item and then “Deactivate” to remove it from your profile.
Dave Johnson / Business Insider
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