14 DAY TRIAL // New findings that made the rounds lately indicated that Google tracks your location even when you’re telling it not to on Android devices.
And yet, this isn’t necessarily happening because Google is ignoring your settings, but mostly because some other options remain enabled, allowing the company to track your location.
If this topic is a critical thing for you, there’s actually a way to block it from happening, though we must warn you, it’s not exactly easy to reach them.
While some may say that burying them deep down in the account settings is a way to prevent users from disabling them, anyone caring about their privacy will look into these menus, eventually being able to block some information from being tracked.
It doesn’t take more than a few clicks to turn off location tracking services associated with your account, and here’s what you have to do.
First and foremost, you must be logged in with your Google account – if you want to turn off location tracking on an Android device, for instance, you must use the same account that you used on your phone.
Also, to fully block access to your location, you must first disable tracking on the local device before making any changes in your account.
With these being said, go to google.com in your browser to access account information. On a desktop, click your profile picture in the top right corner and click on Google Account.
If this is a new place for you, there’s no doubt the amount of data displayed may be overwhelming. And yet, everything has a role here, including letting you to disable location tracking.
From this point, it’s all just a matter of clicks, and here’s the path that you must follow:
Your personal info > Manage your Google activity > Go to Activity Controls
The Activity controls menu gives you access to information that is related to any activity you’ve performed with a Google account. As Google explains, “the data saved to your account helps give you more personalized experiences across all Google services.”
There are several sections that are included here and which you need to disable, including web and app activity, location history, device information, voice and audio activity, YouTube search history, and YouTube watch history. Disabling them is as easy as clicking the toggle next to each entry.
If you want to see more information about your past tracked locations, click the option that reads Manage activity in the location section.
You’ll be able to “rediscover the places you’ve been and the routes you’ve traveled in your timeline,” as Google points out, and you are allowed to delete any logged data.
To do this, click any day in the timeline and then hit the trash icon in the lower right corner. This will delete an entire day from the Google servers, and you can do the same thing for any other information.
As you’ll probably discover, there’s a lot of information that Google stored about you, especially if you haven’t previously blocked location tracking and the other features. The company guarantees that you’re the only one seeing them, so there should be any privacy concern in this regard.
But on the other hand, it’s true that they’re not really in an easy to reach place, and rookies may have a hard time actually using these controls. Fortunately, they’re still there, so if you want to protect your data, you know what you have to do. Just make sure that you double-check each option before turning it off or removing any data.