“Google is making it easier to see the search, browsing and YouTube viewing history it keeps on you, to delete any items you don’t want included, and to stop the company from logging your activity in future,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac. “It’s doing this to comply with new European privacy regulations, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).”
You can now choose to switch off data-logging for the following categories:
• Web & app activity
• Location history
• Device information
• Voice & audio activity
• YouTube search history
• YouTube watch history
Lovejoy reports, “Google has also rewritten its privacy policy in plain English, another legal requirement for GDPR compliance.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Delete, block, and, regardless of these changes, use Duck Duck Go as much as possible!
For more info, see Google’s “Our preparations for Europe’s new data protection law” post on the company’s official blog here.
Every one of my “options” for Google “services” are off/paused – have been for as long as I have used Google. Unfortunately my experiences are that Google searches remain most efficient compared to alternatives, so I continue to use the service. Pragmatic real-world decision – my time is money.
and your impatience is Google’s money.
Thankfully, all my (annoying and numerous) strategies for keeping Google out of my private life have been working well. They ain’t got nothin’ on me. I like it that way.
DuckDuckGo.com only gets better with time. I rarely bother with Google.com because I rarely need to. Thank you to all the DuckDuckGo project contributors! You’re saving the computing world. 😀
As for the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) from the EU: Much of it has been poorly thought out and will have some extremely awful consequences. The fact that it wipes out WHOIS data demonstrates its severe problems. My European friends are not amused. Neither is ICANN. This flaky law is going to affect the entire world, not just the EU. Duck and Cover.
Why should one have to create a google account in order to see what google and other such unscrupulous companies have been collecting every time you use any website, including websites like MDN which are dripping with Google AdSense trackers?
A user cannot delete all his data, don’t be fooled. Google, Amazon, FaceBook even Apple — they all keep info on you whether you have signed up for one of their accounts or not. In a world with justice, these scummy practices would require explicit user opt-in by law for every bit of data they collect. All data would have to be user reviewable instantly at any time from any data broker. The user would also have to explicitly grant permission for any company to share or sell that data to a 3rd entity, with the user being compensated with a sizeable cut of the revenue. In a world of justice, assholes at gargle and farcebook would not make themselves billionaires by stealing your private data. Unfortunately, thenworld is not just, governments are owned by multinational corporations with no morals, and the sheeple will give away everything for the promise of convenience. Once the population is hooked, the pushers will turn up the pricing. Sorry about that dramatic jump in subscription cost. But we have all your data so pay up if you ever want to see it again. Embezzlement by another name…..