On October 7, 2011 at 10:57 pm, I watched Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address on YouTube. On June 17, 2013 at 5:54 am, I searched for the phrase “neither out far nor in deep” – the title of a delightful Robert Frost poem. On March 10, 2014 at 9:40 am, I searched an address in Havelock North. How do I remember all this stuff so precisely? I don’t. But Google does.
Back in 2018, Google quietly dropped the famous “Don’t be evil” preface in its Code of Conduct, presumably because there’s not so much money in not being evil. One of those potentials for being evil, at least in my book, is to record every thing you’ve ever searched for, every video you’ve ever watched, every Google ad you’ve ever clicked on, every app you’ve ever downloaded, and every place you’ve ever visited, day in and day out, essentially forever.
But don’t take my word for it. Check out your own history. Visit https://www.google.com/history/ and keep on scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling… (In the end, I stuck a bit of Blu Tack on PgDn key on my keyboard and went to lunch. Seriously, that list is almost endless.)
If you just want to check out your YouTube search history, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history. (YouTube is owned by Alphabet Inc., which also owns Google.)
To its credit, Google does acknowledge the data it collects, along with other information you provide directly, such as;
- Your name, birthday and gender
- Your password and phone number
- Emails that you write and receive on Gmail
- Photos and videos that you save
- Docs, Sheets and Slides that you create on Drive
- Comments that you make on YouTube
- Contacts that you add
- Calendar events
And it does provide tools to let you block or remove some of that data. Here’s a few of them…
Turn off ad personalisation
http://www.google.com/settings/ads/
Stop advertisers collecting data from you
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
This takes you to a downloadable browser add-on for Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari, Firefox and Opera.
Show all third-party apps that have access to your account
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history
You can also delete them.
Turn off the collection of web and app activity, location history, and YouTube watch and search history
https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
Automatically delete your history
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?restrict=waa
Under Keeping activity until you delete it manually click Choose to delete automatically and select a time period; After 3 months or After 18 months.
Delete you YouTube history
https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols/youtube
Under Keeping activity until you delete it manually click Choose to delete automatically and select a time period; After 3 months or After 18 months.
Now, if only the same controls were available for that other privacy gobbler, Facebook…
Image credit: (c) Can Stock Photo / arunchristensen