Reviewing Google's privacy settings
?? Hans Vargas-Silva
Information Security Leader | Purdue @CERIAS alumni | Life-long Learner | Board Member & Community Volunteer | Immigrant | Husband and Father
When was the last time you took a minute to review the privacy setting from Google services? Right, a while. As many of you already know I support free enterprise; however, some of the free services we 'enjoy' are more than ever at the cost of our digital identities, privacy and security. For this reason I decided to take a few minutes to explore the options that are available to us to limit the data we constantly shared with cloud service providers.
For starters, go to Google Dashboard: https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard, and explore some of the options there. I expand on more detail below.
Another thing you can do is to go to Search Activity (https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity) and delete by topic or product:
Your Google Services - you can glance at the amount and type of data they have on you and that we depend on. Based on that you can start making some decisions and adjusting your preferences.
Review the options from the Data & Personalization (https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization). Here you can review:
- Activity Controls [PAUSE all]
- Activity and Timeline [DELETE historical data]
- Things you create and do
- Add Personalization [Turn OFF]
- Account Storage [MANAGE]
- Download, Delete, Or Make a plan for your data [REVIEW]
Privacy Checkup - This is a great idea, as it walks you through layers of options, click the image below for a link to it
1. Personalize your Google experience, 2. Make ads more relevant to you, 3. Control what others see about you, 4. Help people connect with you, 5. Manage your Google Photos settings, 6. Manage what you share on YouTube
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[Need a copy? Download your data]
Your data will be conveniently stored for ever though. For instance Google+ is no longer available, BUT a copy of your data is still available to be downloaded. This can be accomplished by the "Download You Data" option: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
As a personal experiment, I selected to download data from services I was not as familiar with or that I thought I didn't use. The result was very eye-opening, I found tracking of my purchases and reservations online (not surprise there), my own voice saying "hello google" (that was unexpected), books, movies and other interesting data (json, html, jpegs, ..) that is collected from all of us.
ITRG Senior PR Manager ??Connecting Journalists with Top Industry Experts
5 年Great article Hans! Very important to keep tabs on our online data, and like you mentioned when a product is free, you're the product.