
More plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom – and even Apple’s excellent but now defunct Aperture program – came along. The company’s first product was a digital filter called Define, that did an amazing job of cleaning up the digital noise that was so common with files from early digital cameras when shot at higher ISO sensitivities. If you open up the Google app for iOS, tap the three dots lower right, and then choose Privacy and Security, you can stop Google from tracking your location on this particular device.The company in question was called Nik… nothing to do with Nikon, just a happy coincidence. Over on iOS, Google doesn't have as many deep hooks into the operating system, as you might expect. From there, you can specify what apps can access your location, camera, contacts, and more. If you'd rather restrict this on an app-by-app basis, go to Apps & notifications, then Advanced, then App permissions instead. Tap Location from the menu to turn off location tracking completely for the Android device you're using. Expect to see purchases and reservations show up here too. Tap Google Account to get to the pages we've already looked at above, but on your smartphone tap Ads to opt out of personalized ads specifically on your phone or tap Search, Assistant & Voice to see what Google Assistant has on you. On Android, you can open up Settings then pick Google to tweak some data-tracking options. Since the first two are basically binary, we're going to focus on that third option. Ultimately, your choice is either to trust Google to use all this data responsibly (you can view the privacy policy here), not use Google services at all, or limit the information it can gather about you. 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.Ī lot of the data we're going to talk about here is only visible to you, or used in a limited way to make ads more relevant to you.

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.


It's an extensive set of data, but you can take more control over what Google collects about you and how long the company keeps it. You're probably aware that Google keeps tabs on what you're up to on its devices, apps, and services-but you might not realize just how far its tracking reach extends, into the places you go, the purchases you make, and much more.
