Tech Tips: Control Your Google Data
Depending on what Google services you might use (I use a lot of them!), Google collects an enormous amount of data about you. Google then uses that data to personalize services (like YouTube recommendations, for example), but it also uses that data for commercial purposes such as advertising services and training its artificial intelligence agents.
Recognizing that users should have more control over their data, Google recently released some new data settings, including the option to autodelete your data after a specific time interval. For this Tech Tip, you will learn how to manage your Google data settings. You can pause Google data collection for various services if you want, and/or you can set an autodelete feature so that your Google data will be automatically deleted after a specific time interval.
Here are the step by step instructions:
STEP ONE: Learn about your options
This article in the New York Times provides a good overview of the current range of activity settings: How to Set Your Google Data to Self-Destruct.
STEP TWO: Log on to myactivity.google.com and adjust settings
If you go to myactivity.google.com, The menu items are on the left-hand side of the screen.
Delete Activity allows you to delete data now, and you can also configure auto-deletion settings.
Activity Controls is where you can disable specific types of Google data collection such as voice and audio.
You can also click on Google Account to access other Google privacy and security options. If you have not enabled two-factor authentication for your Google account, along with a backup recovery option, I would urge you to do that now too!
STEP THREE: Blog post
When you are done, write up a quick blog post with your thoughts about Google services. Do you use a lot of Google services? Is Google's data collection and data re-use something you think about if/when you use Google services? Is this a topic you know a lot about, or not much? When you want to learn about topics like online privacy, where do you turn for the information you need?
Use the phrase "Tech Tip: Google Data" as your blog post title and "Tech Tip" as the label. And now you're ready to do the Declaration!