How to Manage Your Google Privacy Settings
Dig into Google’s account dashboard to see what the company knows about you.
A privacy policy is meant to be a contract between you and a company—big tech companies in particular—that ensures these companies are keeping your data safe. One company that has an enormous amount of your data, from email and photos to videos and documents, is Google.
The Google Privacy Policy has been “updated” 37 times since its inception in 1999; it typically happens three or four times a year. To its credit, Google makes all the updates and changes pretty obvious and provides an archive of all previous policies.
It can and will change to suit Google, or to suit new laws and regulations Google has to follow. For example, in 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) completely changed how big companies handle customer data. Even though it’s an EU regulation, the GDPR touched any company with personally identifiable info (PII) on customers there. That’s definitely Google.
GDPR doesn’t necessarily help those of us in the United States, but there are ways to take control of what Google has on you. That means mastering your Google My Account dashboard.
