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Journalism of Courage
The focus on data privacy is more than ever and with tech giants like Facebook and Google giving more their users more control over how their data want to be shared. The theme of Facebook’s F8 developer conference was “Future is private” and same goes for Google I/O this year, during which the company CEO emphasised that data privacy is for everyone.
Google has included much more privacy controls in its latest Android Q, which will roll out this fall. However, to ensure the privacy of your Google account, including YouTube and Google Photos, there are several options can one can look at.
Let us take a look at how to do a complete review of your Google account:
• Click on your Google account and click on ‘Get started’ in “Review your privacy settings”.
• The first privacy setting is for personalising your Google experience, which also has the option to delete your “Web & App Activity” data.
• The data can be left with Google until one manually deletes or there is the option of deleting data automatically after 18 or three months. Read more here.
• Up next is the Location History option, which has pretty much all the places you might have visited with the option turned on.
• As of now, there is only the option to delete Location History permanently, but Google has said it will roll out auto delete option similar to ‘Web & Activity’ app as well in the coming weeks.
• You can also pause your Location history from Location controls.
• Next up is the option to ‘Manage Device Information’, which can again, be paused from Activity control, just like Location History.
• Device Information activity basically saves information related to apps as well things like contacts lists, alarms, and music. This, Google says, is done to give you personalised results when you ask it to perform an action like call a contact, etc.
• It also includes information like battery level, the quality of your Wi-Fi, whether your display is on, and more.
• Similarly, ‘Voice & Audio” activity can be paused if you do not want Google to save your voice for when you give voice commands to the Assistant.
• There ares settings to pause your YouTube Search History and YouTube Watch History as well.
• From the Privacy Checkup dashboard you can also manage your Google Photos settings by choosing whether you want to remove geo location from photos when you share them by link.
• Finally, there are controls to make changes to your information that is visible to everyone like profile photo, your organisation, album, and more.
