Google has a ton of data. About you. About me. About almost everyone. It’s the gift and curse surrounding its services. The company is consistently linked to things on Android like voice search, web browsing, data usage, and even your location.
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For most people, location logging is the one topic that freaks them out enough to worry or consider changes. It’s important that Google uses your location, yes, but you don’t have to let them keep that data for the long term.
Google location and activity
For the purposes of this post we will canvas the Settings app in Android to make sure we set our history to auto-delete. This means that although Google will access data for necessary tasks, we’ll make delete said data according to preferences. It sounds daunting, but we’ll get there in just a few clicks.
- Open the Settings app from your app drawer
- Find the Google menu option
- Select Google Account at the top of the next screen
- Hit Data & personalization in the top menu
- Under Activity, controls tap Web & app Activity
- Click Manage Activity
- Select Choose to delete automatically
- Pick between the three options provided by Google
- Confirm your choice
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A little more incognito
Much like going with Incognito Mode in the Chrome browser, this should set your account up for a much less tracking pattern from Google.
Again, the data is being used for your tasks when you need it, but Google will then completely remove the cache from its servers. Want to change it later? You can easily go back through these steps to reverse your current settings.
Want to check your history or make adjustments on the web? Not a problem. You can go to your Google Account page and find a similar banner on the left side of the page to adjust your Data & Personalization options.
From there, the steps are the same as the above bullet points starting with Web & app activity. Just like the app settings, you can then choose your data auto-delete preferences.