How to delete your Google activity and prevent them from following what you do

At this point, it will probably not surprise you to learn that Google stores a record of –almost– all the activity you do throughout each day when you use its services and platforms –YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome …– What you may not know until now, is that whenever you want, you can delete all that activity and prevent Google from having access to it.

In this guide, we explain step by step how to delete your Google activity, either manually or automatically, and from any device. The process is also relatively simple, and you can do it both from the computer and the mobile, either iOS or Android. Also, if you want, you can have the data automatically deleted when you decide.

Delete your Google activity from your computer

To delete your Google activity from a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, all you need is a browser, be it Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, or any other, from which to log into your Google account and thus access your settings. Now, you have to follow these steps:

• Open Google and go to your account from the image in the upper right – you must click on “Manage your Google account” -.
• From the side menu, access the “Data and personalization” section
• Look for the “Activity and chronology” box and access the selection “My Activity.”
• In the side menu, go to “Delete activity by.”
• Choose from when you want to delete the stored activity – last hour, last day, or forever

Once the process is complete, the data will be deleted from Google’s servers, and the company will not have access to it. You can stop Google from collecting activity data or delete data from individual services or platforms from this same settings panel.

Delete your Google activity from your mobile

You can also carry out this same process directly from your mobile if you want. To do this, you have to have the Google account from which you want to delete the activity associated with the device, and follow these simple steps:

• Open the “System Settings” application and go to the “Google” section
• Tap on the button “Manage your Google account.”
• Go to the “Data and Personalization” tab and tap on “My Activity.”
• Touch the icon with three vertical dots on the right of the search bar, and choose “Delete activity by.”
• Choose from when you want to delete the stored activity – last hour, last day, or forever

That’s it. In the same way that if you decide to delete the data through the desktop version of Google, you can delete data from specific services or prevent Google from storing data related to your activity again. Of course, keep in mind that by doing this, you will lose some of the functions or advantages that these services offer by having access to your data.

Set up automatic deletion of your Google activity

Finally, you can also configure your Google account to delete the activity data automatically. At the time, we already explained how to configure this automatic activity deletion function, but it does not hurt to review the steps to follow to activate it:

• Open the “System Settings” application and go to the “Google” section
• Tap on the button “Manage your Google account.”
• Go to the “Data and Personalization” tab and tap on “Activity on the web and in Applications / Location history / YouTube history” – you must schedule automatic deletion in each section individually–
• Tap on “Manage activity.”
• On the page that will open, look for the section indicating that “The activity will be kept until you delete it manually” and tap on “Change this setting.”
• Choose how long the activity can be stored before being deleted

Thus, Google will offer you the possibility of keeping the data stored until now and deleting the action once the configured period has passed or deleting the old data.