How to Keep Google Out of Your Business

We all know Google likes to collect our every waking moment to capitalize on targeted ad campaigns and catered content. See my other blog on the hidden cost of Voice Assistants for additional detail. However, Google, being the monolith that it is, is very difficult to avoid entirely even if you wanted to. My main email accounts are Google based, I enjoy YouTube like many others and certainly more often than not I use Google Search rather than alternatives such as DuckDuckGo.

Luckily, you can go into your account privacy settings and tell Google to provide you all their great services AND to keep their grubby hands off your data. You can do this fairly easily from either your android device associated with your account or online via a desktop internet browser.

Forewarning, there are some features of Google services that you may have grown accustomed to that following these steps may hinder the performance of. Educate yourself on these features and decide if you think your privacy is worth it. The impact is minimal and doesn't prevent use of any of the major services, only slight features like recommendations.

The Browser Method

First, head to https://myaccount.google.com/privacy

If you'd like to clear out any of the data they've already collected, click on GO TO MY ACTIVITY

From here, select the three dots in the top right to expand the menu and select "Delete activity by". 

Then choose the filter options of All Time and All Products and click the Delete button. It will beg you to let the Google monster keep all that precious data. No thanks! 

Now that it's all clear, we'll want to stop Google from continuing to collect all this data. 

Head over to https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols .

Simply scroll down the page and select Pause for Web & App Activity, Location History, Device Information, Voice & Audio Activity, YouTube Search History and YouTube Watch History.

For a few final touches, going back to https://myaccount.google.com/privacy , scroll to the bottom and check your Location Sharing and Search Settings and adjust to your liking. 

For example, under Search Settings I chose "Do not use private results" because I want to see genuine search results when making a search and not echo chamber influenced private results that google deems more "relevant" to me.

Android Devices

I noticed that making this change in the browser did not seem to immediately impact the settings on my android device and had to follow up with adjusting these same settings on my android device as well.

This may vary depending on your version of android and specific device. In my case, I found the settings under Settings -> Google -> Personal Info & Privacy .

Check your Activity Controls, My Activity, Search Settings and Location Settings just as above. Once all paused and activity cleared, you should be all set to use Google worry free of your data being collected and online identity being sold to the highest bidder.

Explore these settings and get comfortable with them as they are undoubtedly going to change. It may be a good idea to revisit this page quarterly or bi-annually just to make sure things are where you left them. I'm not super comfortable with their choice of the word "Pause" for stopping their activity collecting. 

I hope you all have a great day, thanks for reading and stay safe out there.