On Data Protection Day, here is how to control your privacy with Google Privacy Check-up

This Data Privacy Day, make some changes to your Google Privacy Check-up settings to control your privacy.

Google Privacy Check-up can give your simple options to ensure your data privacy. (Flickr)

Google knows what you did last summer! Not just that, it know everything you have done whenever you have gone online! Yes, you can kiss your privacy goodbye now, if you have not done so years ago. Having said that, there is a way that you can stop yourself from being tracked. Yes, some semblance of privacy can still be protected, but that too is courtesy a feature called Google Privacy Check-up. As we were saying, from your queries to searches, Google has all the data. But what happens to such an enormous amount of data? Google saves your data about what you've done online and where you've been. While Google helps you find relevant search results, gets you home through the shortest routes with various Google services like Google Search and Maps, it also tracks your preferences to serve you ads and more. However, you can keep certain things private despite all the snooping and limit the information you are being virtually forced to share. So, on this ‘Data Privacy Day', let's make some changes in privacy settings to our Google account to make it more secure.

What to do with Google Privacy Check-up

1. Automatically delete Web and App Activity

Despite the fact that Web & App Activity helps you get the results faster, discover new content, and even helps to redirect you to the location where you left earlier, but the reality will remain the same that your data is getting stored every second. Though, Google allows you to control how long your web and app browsing and visiting activity will be saved, meaning you can set up an auto-delete option. Besides the auto-delete option, you can delete particular or all saved data from your history.

2. Check YouTube History

Like your web browsing and app activity, you can automatically delete your YouTube history too. It will give you an option to set auto-delete activity from days to months and years.

3. Location history

One always tends to use Google Maps to find the right way to get to the destination, or upload pictures from a specific location. Collectively, all this data is stored by Google. But you can control it too. You can set it to off and this will restrict Google to record your location history or can set an auto-delete option to ensure that Google is deleting all the previously recorded data after a period of time.

4. Make a plan for your inactive account

If there is an account that has been inactive for a long time or you stopped using it, you can decide what will happen to your data. Basically, you can have a detailed plan for your account, from deciding when Google should consider your account as inactive to deleting it forever.

5. How to set Google settings for privacy

To set the above-mentioned settings, you will need to go to myaccount.google.com while logging into your Google account. Here, you will find the ‘Data and privacy' option in the sidebar. Click on it, which will give detailed information about privacy and data. You will find all these settings only under Privacy Check-up feature.