It’s no secret that Google tracks a lot of data about you, from the websites you visit to the videos you watch, the things you’ve searched for, and the places you have visited. Scrubbing this data from your Google account has required you to manually dig into your settings each time. That’s changing soon.
In the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out a feature to users around the world that will let them set this information to be deleted automatically every three or 18 months.
"We work to keep your data private and secure, and we’ve heard your feedback that we need to provide simpler ways for you to manage or delete it," Google said in a blog post published Wednesday.
For now, these controls are only coming to your location history and web and app activity, but it’s likely that they’ll come to more of your data history at some point.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 04 2019, @08:42PM (2 children)
At present, Google does not track my location history, at all. Not on any account. Or, at least, the settings are set that way, and I can find no history of locations. With this new change, are they going to eliminate the settings I have set?
I'm a bit more interested in purchase history. There is no setting to prevent Google tracking purchases through email notifications. The only "setting" for that, is to use another email service for purchases, or setting up your own server.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 04 2019, @08:50PM (1 child)
Gmail is becoming big enough to just mark all mail from your own server as spam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @12:09AM
You can buy a Fastmail account, or one from another large established email provider, for a few dollars a month.