Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You check out a pair of shoes online and suddenly they’re haunting every web page you sign in to.

Or worse, you have a conversation near your cellphone about something, and their adverts are suddenly cropping up in sidebars everywhere.

(As an aside, if you haven’t yet changed your WhatsApp profile picture privacy settings, check this out.)

Most of us are well aware that Google keeps tabs on us, the places we go, the purchases we make, and the sites we visit.

What you might not know is that you can take control of what Google collects about you and how long they keep it.

Here’s WIRED,

It’s worth emphasizing first that we’re really dealing with two topics: The amount of data Google collects on you, which is a lot, and what Google then does with it. Google would say its data collection policies improve its services—helping you find a restaurant similar ones you’ve liked previously, say—whereas users might disagree.

If you want to take control of your data, you need to do the following:

• Sign in to your Google account and go to the Activity Controls page. There the data that Google holds on you is split into six sections. Turn off tracking by using the toggle switches that you see on the screen.
• The top two sections – Web & App Activity and Location History – are the main ones.
• Go to Web App Activity and click the Manage Activity link. Click on Filter by date & product at the top to see all of the apps that this tracking covers and how they’ve been used.
• Apply a filter – such as ‘Android’ – and delete all matching entries by clicking the trash can icon.
• To delete everything, select the Delete activity by link on the left. Select All time as a date range and All products as the filter. Hit Delete.
• Another option is to have Google automatically delete everything older than three months by clicking Choose to delete automatically at the top of the activity list.
• To delete your location history go to Manange activity and click the trash can icon in the corner of the map.

Moving on to your devices, audio, YouTube and Gmail:

• Go to Device Information.  This covers phones and tablets that you use to connect to your Google account and doesn’t include much in the way of individual activity on your devices, which you’ve already gone through under Web & App Activity. Here you wipe the entire history by hitting Delete all.
• To manage your audio devices go to Voice and Audio Activity. Click Manage activity to get a list of everything you’ve said, and even the option to play back the audio recording.
• Click the three dots to the side of a recording to delete it, the trash can icon to delete an entire day, or the Delete activity by link on the left to wipe everything from this category at once.
• YouTube Search History and YouTube Watch History are both structured in the same way as Voice & Audio Activity, with options to erase records one by one, a day at a time, or all together via the Delete activity by link.

Finally, that annoying targeted advertising.

Sign into your Google account. At the top is your age and gender, followed by a whole host of topics that Google thinks you’re interested in—click on any of these entries and choose Turn off to strike it from the record.

Done.

And while this won’t solve all of your internet problems, it goes a long way towards easing the paranoia.

[source:wired]