It’s sometimes helpful to have your location history and your activity data on your digital products so it can custom search results or you can easily find where you were a few weeks ago. But over the past couple of years, data privacy has become a hot button topic for a lot of the major brands like Google, Facebook, Twitter. etc. Now Google is giving its users an option to auto-delete their web & app activity and their location history if they prefer it that way.
While keeping your data would allow Google to be more useful to you, if you prefer to keep your privacy, you now have more options to choose from, aside from just manually deleting it all (or partially) or to not turn it on at all. Currently, you have those on or off controls that you can toggle and pause whenever you want to, but sometimes you either forget to manually delete it or you don’t mind that it’s still all there.
Soon, Google will be rolling out some new controls for keeping and deleting your web & app activity. The first choice is to still keep your data until you delete manually. The next two are the auto-delete options. You can choose to keep for 18 months and then it will delete it by then or to just keep it for 3 months and then auto-delete after. Any data older than those time periods will be automatically deleted “on an ongoing basis”.
These options will first be available on your Location History and your Web & App Activity but they will start rolling it out in the coming weeks with no specific time frame. We also don’t know if they will eventually have these options available in other Google products like YouTube watch history and voice commands that you give through Google Assistant and Google Home.
In the meantime, you always have the manual option to pause your web & app activity in the settings section of your account or accounts. Just be aware of what Google will not be able to do once you do so.
