How To Stop Google From Tracking Me in 2023

Here are my 5 tips to make your browsing experience faster and more secure just by changing and updating a few settings.

Maybe you’ve noticed your browsing experience just seems slow and ads are following you everywhere. Or your google search results are no longer relevant to your needs. Maybe you once googled the actor who plays Jamie Fraser in Outlander and now you keep seeing Instagram Reels of him every time you open IG. I don’t mind seeing men in kilts, but I need a bit more variety in my life. Today we’re focusing on one of the tools that you use on your phone and PC every single day - the browser.

If you haven’t done so, or maybe don’t want to take the leap into uninstalling Google Chrome and choosing one of these privacy-first browsers instead, then you can make some changes to Chrome itself to make it a little less… intrusive.

We’ll be spending some time on this page in your Google Settings: https://myactivity.google.com/product/search - You’ll see a few options at the top including history and controls, so click on controls.

Google explains that your Web and App Activity is saved including data like your location, for things like faster searches, Maps personalization, and personalized ads.

You can really get into the weeds on this page in terms of customization, but for most people you’ll probably just want to turn this off completely. If you find that you commonly need to use personalized search results to find your interests, you may want to leave this setting on but turn on Auto-Delete. Auto-Delete automatically deletes your web and app activity after a set period of time - that can be 3 months, 18 months, or 36 months. That means you’ll still have recent relevant searches and personalized queries saved in your history, but after those searches hit 3, 18, or 36 months old, they get deleted. That can limit the amount of data Google stores about you, but it still offers some conveniences if you need them.

Under History, scroll down and you’ll see all of your searches made across all of your devices that are signed into your Google account, and this can also include websites you’ve visited. If there’s something in particular you want to delete, you can click the X icon next to that item and immediately remove it. Or you can click the Delete button to customize how many items to remove over a set amount of time or delete everything at once.

Anytime you speak to Assistant, your questions are recorded as well. You can find them under your Activity at this link: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity - and the same rule applies - you can click the X or click Delete to customize deletions.

As you go through this process, you may be asking yourself if there are other places where your data might be stored - and I have got to tell you about my sponsor for this episode, DeleteMe. I signed up as a customer for DeleteMe years ago and I never let my membership lapse because I’ve seen how it benefits my life every day. There are tons of websites that let the public search for home addresses, telephone number, full names and more and your data is likely on those sites without your consent. They do offer opt outs, but the process is convoluted and sometimes require you to go through multiple steps just to wipe your info off of them, but then they just put your data right back on their sites after a few months.

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Let’s hop back over to your browser settings.

Your browser is still full of data though, and not just the Google account data. If you open Chrome, click on the 3 dots in the top right corner and go to Settings, then click Privacy and Security, then Clear browsing data.

This is the section where you can find cookies and site data (which you should be deleting from time to time because cookies keep you logged into sites and the little files take up space - they add up quickly and also be a security concern). Clearing this data means that yes, you’ll probably have to re-login to your sites, so have your yubikey or 2fa app ready to reauthenticate, but it also means you’ll have a cleaner browser to work with. Cached images and files from sites you’ve visited saves time, but also takes up some space - on my phone these files took up a little less than half a gig.

The advanced section is really interesting because it gives you an actual count of how much info is saved about you - so tell me below - if you’re using Chrome, whats the biggest number on this page? Is it your browsing history? Mine was at like 13k before I deleted it.

I find this kind of spring cleaning to be kinda fun and super productive, so if you want to continue - you should take a look at your Maps Timelines and your YouTube History. Both of these pages have options to delete your data for set time intervals. In the case of Youtube, you do have to enable Auto-Delete on this page separately from the search settings. https://myactivity.google.com/product/youtube

Location History shows you a map of all the places you’ve visited and you can go through this timeline and delete specific places or you can delete full days of data. It’s a bit hidden but there’s a gear icon you can click on to turn on Auto-Delete functions for your map as well. https://timeline.google.com/maps/timeline

If you want to turn of personalized Ads, go to this page to disable that: https://myadcenter.google.com/ - or, if you prefer seeing ads for things that are targeted towards you but maybe you’re seeing something you don’t want to see, you can find that Ad on this page and dislike it. There’s even this whole section you can visit that shows you which categories Google uses to personalize ads, like your income, relationship status, employer, your age, if you have kids, etc. and you can click into each of those items to disable them. This can be incredibly useful if you’ve had a personal loss and are being hit with ads for something that reminds you of that loss, if you’ve had a traumatic event and want to remove triggers, or you just want to remove personalized ads entirely.

Now to keep y’all in the loop, Google is planning to deprecate third party cookies in 2024 via a roll out to users. This is a part of their Privacy Sandbox feature which “replaces third-party cookies with a more privacy-conscious approach, allowing users to manage their interests and group them into cohorts based on similar browsing patterns”. So we may see a lot of privacy changes in the coming year in terms of the settings, and if so, I’ll post an updated video.

I fully understand that some folks may want to completely throw away their phone at this point, so I will recommend taking a look at privacy centric distros like GrapheneOS and checking out some of the privacy-first browsers that I’ve included in a previous video, linked below, but if you’re trying to keep Android on your phone but mitigate some of those risks and your threat level doesn’t necessarily require a full OS wipe, then these are some of the steps you can take just in your browser to better privatize your data. Stay safe, bye yall!