This Is What Google Knows About You And This May Make You Uneasy!

You have a question… you type it in Google search and try to find an answer. You don’t know about a place… you try finding it through Google maps. You had missed that popular video going viral a couple of days back… Google gets it for you. If you consider it… does a single day go by without you using Google on your smartphone, laptop or PC? The answer in all probability would be no! While doing all above things do you feel apprehensive about the things that Google knows about you? If you do, then no problem because you are not alone and also Google doesn’t even want to hide what it knows about you.

Google knows what places you have visited

For Android users, it is one of the most basic information that Google knows about you owing to your device. You can actually see your timeline of locations, trips, the places you have visited most frequently and the routes you generally trace while reaching someplace. The tool also helps you to check specific days to check specific locations you have travelled to. And if you do not like this ‘tracking’ thing then simple, you can very well pause the location history

It has a profile of you based on your history

Google actually keeps account of your interests, your age, gender hobbies etc. This is the reason why you see advertisements according to your interest. It manages to do so, on the basis of a database of the websites visited by you like Search, YouTube, etc. A service known as Google Analytics lets publishers see the pages you have visited, the number of times you have visited them and the amount of time you spent on a particular page. But you have all the rights to opt out of this service by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out browser add-on available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari.

It also keeps track of your search history, voice activity and YouTube history

Whether you are aware of this or not, Google keeps a database of all your searches made on the Google app in mobile devices and on the web in the Google History page. Even your voice and audio activity are also being tracked- so much so that you can literally play your voice commands from the history page. But if you do not like this tracking, you can delete all these details by hitting the three-dot button on the top right and after selecting delete you can delete all the activities from today, yesterday, past month or all time.

You have the right to choose and decide

You have to keep in mind that only you can decide which information you want to be in records because it is your profile and history we are talking about. So it is important that you know which details are you sharing with Google through your account and for this you have Google’s personal info & privacy page. This is the page where you can choose to turn off any activity that you don’t want to be tracked.

You can check the apps that have an access to your Google account data. Some apps can access your data even when you have uninstalled them. But note that, you can easily stop any app from accessing data from Google account. For this, you have to go to Google Security page, then to “Connected apps & sites”. This is where you can manage the apps accessing your data.

You can go Google free after downloading all of your account data. You can select data from Google+, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Fit, Photos, Hangouts, Maps, YouTube and more. Once you have selected the data you want to archive, you can hit next and choose the compressed file format for your download. Then, you can either choose to get the download link on your email account or add the file to Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive.

So at the end of the day, Google may know a hell lot of things about you but it will never do so without your permission. So the reins are in your hands.

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