The new My Activity tool allows you to monitor all your web activity, and decide what you want to erase forever.
Google stores all the activities that users perform using its main services (the search engine, YouTube, Maps, e-mail and more) and uses this information to send us perfectly targeted advertising on what it believes to be our interests.
In this way, however, the Big G risks embarrassing users, and not necessarily because you have done something you are ashamed of: your girlfriend may find out what you want to give her for her birthday after seeing it appear on the browser, later on. to your research, advertisements for women’s shoes. Or, related videos that are shown on YouTube may tell too much about what you saw on the video streaming service during a sleepless night.
Thanks to the Google My Activity service you can now force the search engine to delete all traces of your unwanted activities. Furthermore, the procedure is simple.
- Go to myactivity.google.com, you will be prompted to enter your password again for security reasons (only you, in fact, have access to your online actions). Here you can immediately see an overview of everything you have done today and in the past days, divided according to the tools used.
- Find the element you want to delete (for example a compromising video seen on YouTube a few days before) and click on the three vertical dots that you find at the top right of each box. This way you can see the details of your individual activities or click the “delete” button to delete those searches once and for all.
- If, on the other hand, you prefer to delete all the activity relating to a specific day or a certain period, simply click the three vertical dots located at the top of the page, to the left of your photo, and then select “delete activity by”. After choosing the right dates, just click delete. You can also choose to clear all your searches at once by selecting “always”.
- You can also choose what to delete based on the product: for example, you may only be interested in deleting searches made on Maps. In this case, at the top of the page, you will find the item “filter by date and product”.
- If you want Google to stop collecting data on your online activity even for a certain period, just go to the Activity Control section and “turn off” the slider relating to “web and app activity”. A box will open that will explain the pros and cons of this choice (which obviously Google would prefer not to take); then, if you select “suspend”, you can browse without Google knowing what you are up to online.
