How to delete everything Google knows about you with LimeVPN
Do you know how much google knows about you? You may be surprised to find out that it knows you even more than you know yourself. Everything you have done and searched for online is saved to a server and so google can to an extent tell every smartphone you have considered buying, every person you have tried to find something bad about, and also every sickness you have had and all of these are based on your google activities.
Table of Content
1 . Your Online Activity Should Be Your Privacy
3. How to Delete Your Google Activity
4. How to Put a Hold on Google from Saving Your Activity
5. The Consequences of Deleting and Disabling Your Google Search History
6. Protect Your Internet Privacy Further
In this article, you will learn how to delete everything Google knows about you permanently so as to maintain a high level of internet privacy. It will also help ensure that your browsing history doesn’t follow you around every time you try to make a search.
You have to note that clearing your browser history and clearing your google web and app activity history are not both the same thing. While the former only delete your search history as stored on your computer, it doesn’t affect the data that is stored on the server.
Your Online Activity Should Be Your Privacy
Do you believe your every move on the internet should be monitored and saved in a server? Your online activity should be kept private and no tabs should be kept on you except with your permission of course.
Interesting Read : How to Manage Google Location History from Multiple Devices?
Google activity keeps a record of everything you have done online which includes your online search and activity. With this, every link you have followed, every image you have viewed, and also every address you have visited are saved in google server. This information collected on you is not for bad purposes but it just feels uneasy if you know everything you do is being saved in a server somewhere. The data collected on you is to make a profile about you that has your age, gender, languages you understand and your preferences. With this profile, your search results are filtered according to your profile, and google also shows you targeted ads based on your profile. In all, it is a way to improve your user experience but it doesn’t change the fact that it takes away your privacy.
Download Your Google Data
Google released its takeout feature in April 2018 that allows you to download your data from Google’s server. So if you want to delete everything Google knows about you, you might want to consider downloading it first. The data you download are those that are gotten from all google products you have used like Gmail, Google search history, chrome, google maps, google photos, calendar, and a lot more. Here is how to download your data using takeout:
#1: go to ‘download your data’ page on google takeout and select the products from where you would want to download your data. All the boxes would have already been marked by default and so you click on ‘next’.
#2: select both the format you would want to download it and the method you would want to get it. After doing that select ‘create archive’.
#3: when the archiving process is complete, you will get an email with a link to download your data.
How to Delete Your Google Activity
#1: log into your Google account and go to my activity page. While there, select the vertical dots at the top right of your screen and from the drop-down select ‘delete activity by’.
#2: under delete by the date change it from ‘today’ to ‘all-time’. Select ‘all products’ and then click on ‘delete’
#3: before you move on to delete, google will tell you why they have your data and what they use it for. Click on ‘ok’.
#4: Google will ask to confirm if you want to delete all your activity as stored. Click on ‘delete’
#5: what you should now see on your screen is ‘no activity’
How to Put a Hold on Google from Saving Your Activity
If you don’t want google to save your online activity, you can put a hold on it. You may be asking “why not just disable it permanently?” google doesn’t let you permanently disable the feature so all you can do is to hit pause which is pretty much the same thing.
#1: from the activity controls page you will see a ‘web & activity’ section. Tap on the switch to take it to the left.
#2: Google will ask to confirm that you want to pause your web & app activity. Click on ‘pause’.
#3: at this time your screen should show ‘web & app activity paused’. And also the sliding switch should be grey and on the left.
#4: if you want to pause google from saving all your activity in all their products you make use of, just turn all the switches off by sliding to the left. Make sure you read the information for each product before you switch it off.
The Consequences of Deleting and Disabling Your Google Search History
Before you delete your google search history, it is necessary that you know the implications of your actions.
Based on your searches, google personalizes the result you get subsequently to suit your preferences. For example, if you always click on the result from a particular site when you search for something, say recipes, google will rank that site above all other results whenever you search for recipes. So if you delete your search history and disable it, the search results you will get each time you search will be broad and not really specific to what you need.
Interesting Read : How to disable and clear off Autofill in Google Chrome?
Deleting your search history and disabling it won’t make you invisible to google nonetheless especially if you still make use of Google products with your Google account. You can only try to limit the amount of information they have on you and secure your internet privacy by cutting down on the number of Google apps and services you use daily. You can alternatively make use of other search engines that will not keep tabs on your searches like DuckuckGo and Startpage.
Protect Your Internet Privacy Further
If you want to secure your internet privacy further, you can do the following to step up your game:
1 . Make Use of A VPN
You may prevent Google from collecting and saving your data from your activity, but doing this will not stop your internet service provider from tracking your activity online. Getting this data places you at risk as it could be shared with third parties or government agencies. To prevent this from happening and to ensure that your internet activity is anonymous and private, make use of a VPN.
2 . Make Use of Tor Browser
Using Tor makes it difficult for your online activities to be traced back to you as it hides your location. It is very good at keeping you anonymous.
Conclusion
Internet privacy is difficult to maintain as a lot of companies and search engines seek your data for their services. Even without your permission, your data can be collected and your online activities monitored and there are ways you can remedy this situation. To maintain a high level of internet privacy, you need to clear out the data google has on you. Clearing out this data and disabling future ones from being saved is the best way to be sure that what you do online is not monitored.
It can make you uneasy if you feel your every move is being monitored and your data could fall into wrong hands and that is why you need to ensure your internet privacy is sure. With a good VPN, you can maintain a high level of internet privacy and anonymity and a good VPN service to make use of is Limevpn. They give you an encrypted connection to the internet and allow you to choose from their pool of IPs.
Rachael Chapman
A Complete gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and love in writing blogs on IOT, software, technology etc
