Protecting your Privacy from Google

Google have provided a new tool, "My Activity" which can help you protect your privacy online and delete your history.

Google probably knows you better than your closest friends and family. With every search you make or YouTube video you watch, the search giant is quietly collecting information for a personalised profile it uses to serve you targeted ads.

My Activity is basically a timeline that shows you what Google has saved about your online activities going back as far as they have been tracking you.

You can find it by going to myactivity.google.com. You will need to sign in with your Google account and password.

Once you have logged in you should see a long chronological list of things you’ve done using Google’s services – the searches you’ve made, videos you’ve watched on YouTube, and so on (assuming you haven’t already used Google’s privacy controls to block the collection of certain information).

Yup! If you don’t want Google remembering that ‘plantar warts’ search or when you binge watched videos of a cat in a shark costume riding a robotic vacuum, it’s pretty simple to erase.

First, you need to find the record you want to delete, which is made easy with the search bar at the top of the page.

Once you’ve found the shameful bit of your online past in the timeline, you can open a little menu by clicking on the three vertical dots on the right side of the record. Select the delete option on that menu, and voila – Google will forget it.

You can also delete things in bulk by clicking on the three dot menu at the top of the timeline, choose ‘‘Delete activity by’’ and selecting a date range to erase on the next page. If you want an entirely blank slate, opt for the ‘‘All Time’’ option.

How to stop Google tracking your data

You can ‘‘pause’’ Google’s data collection whenever you want.

Go to myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols. From there, you can tell Google to stop saving information about things such as your searches, location history, and YouTube watching habits.

But if looking back through your My Activity timeline has you a little paranoid, it’s probably also worth running through Google’s Privacy Checkup.

That feature, which can be found at myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup, uses a simple interface to not only help you manage what data is being saved by Google, but also things like what information about you may be public through services like Google+.

Is there a downside to erasing my history?

Well, there’s definitely one for Google: The search giant makes the vast majority of its money from distributing targeting ads, which is made easier by the trove of data that they have about users’ online activities.

But that means that limiting the data they save will probably result in you seeing ads that are less relevant to your interests.

And beyond ads, Google uses the information to help personalise their products to users’ preferences, which can mean a more convenient online experience.

For instance, Google has said that letting it save your search history can mean that it returns results quicker and letting it hold on to location history can help it suggest better commute options in its Maps product.