This usually happens if you’ve reviewed a product they’re looking at or something similar. This is a setting where your name, profile photo, and activity can be included in ads shown to people you know. One item we’d suggest that everyone turn off is called shared endorsements. Those are the critical pieces of information Google has about you, but there’s still a ton of items to uncover. Shared recommendations in ads is an easy one to turn off. If you have ad personalization turned on you can’t delete any of these categories, but you can turn them off so Google won’t show you ads based on these subjects. It appears that once you search for something a few times it gets tagged in this section. But it also has a long list of advertising subjects Google thinks you’re interested in. This includes basic stuff like your age demographics, gender, marital status, and language. Below that is an entire section that shows how your ads are personalized. This section lets you turn on and off ad personalization in Google products (based on your browsing, search history, YouTube history, and so on). If you want to dip into the weird world of Google data analytics, take a look at Data & personalization > Ad personalization > Go to ad settings. For that you need to go to Gmail’s settings under General > Create contacts for auto-complete.Ī sampling of Google’s ad personalization settings. This setting does not, however apply to a similar setting in Gmail. There’s also a setting for saving contact information for people you interact with in Google services. This section of the My Account site lets you turn on or off features such as automatically saving contacts from your signed-in devices, like a phone. Alternatively, you can just go to the dedicated Contacts site while signed into your Google account. You don’t need to jump into Gmail to manage this-they are easily accessible via My Account at People & sharing > Contacts. If you’ve decided to manage your contacts on a separate service such as your own Nextcloud instance, then you may want to get rid of your contacts on Google. This is found at Data & Personalization > Activity Controls > YouTube History, and it follows the same basic settings that we saw in the other two sections. Here you won’t delete information, but rather choose who can see it across Google’s services.īelow that we have another auto-delete option, as well as links to Google’s My Activity page where you can delete past audio recordings, specific searches, and app usage on Android.įinally, there’s your YouTube histories, which includes your watch and search histories. You also cannot change or delete your alternate usernames if you have any.Ĭlick on the link Go to About me in the “Choose what others see” tile toward the bottom of the page. If Google has your birthdate this cannot be deleted, but you can change it and restrict who is able to see it. The key bits Google insists on having include your name and nickname. Click anything in this section with an arrow to the right, and it will take you to a screen where you can manage this data.Īlmost all of this information can be deleted, or if not it can be changed. Here you’ll see listed information such as your name, nickname (usually your first name), birthdate, gender, backup email addresses for account recovery, and phone numbers. The easiest place to start is the Personal info tab. The Personal Info section on Google’s My Account website. We’ll also be jumping around a bit to deal with the sections where the most critical personal information lies. You could go through each tab, but to target our purge strategically we’ll stick to the tabs at the top.
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