I Spent an Hour Going Through Everything Google Knows About Me. Here's What I Actually Turned Off.
I opened Google's activity dashboard on a whim expecting a short list and found years of searches, every YouTube video I'd ever watched, and a location history detailed enough to reconstruct my actual daily routine. That was enough to make me go through every relevant setting properly instead of vaguely knowing "Google tracks stuff" without doing anything about it. Here's exactly what I changed, and what actually made a visible difference.
Activity Controls: Start at myactivity.google.com
This is the actual dashboard, not a setting buried three menus deep — go to myactivity.google.com signed into your account, and you'll see everything logged by category. Three mattered most to me: Web & App Activity is the biggest one — search history, sites visited through Chrome, interactions across Google's apps. I toggled it off, which does make search predictions less tailored, a genuine tradeoff I decided was worth it. You can also set auto-delete instead of fully pausing it, choosing 3, 18, or 36 months — I went with 3, since I don't actually reference old search history and would rather it just not exist. Location History logs where you go and how long you spend there in real detail. Turning it off gave a warning about affected features, but navigation itself (turn-by-turn directions) still works fine without it — what you lose is Google's memory of past trips, not live routing. YouTube History tracks watched videos and searches, which directly shapes recommendations. I turned this off too and noticed my homepage recommendations got noticeably more generic afterward — a real, visible tradeoff, not hypothetical.
Ad Personalization: The Settings Page Actually Moved
If you've seen older guides pointing to adssettings.google.com, that page still technically exists but Google has been folding its functionality into a newer hub: **myadcenter.google.com**. That's the one I'd actually use now — go there, find the "Personalized ads" toggle on the home screen, and switch it off. You'll still see ads afterward, just based on general context (the page you're on, time of day) rather than your personal history. Worth going a layer deeper too: under Manage Privacy in My Ad Center, there are separate toggles for whether your on-site activity, YouTube history, and location data specifically feed into ad targeting — I turned all three off individually rather than assuming the main toggle covered everything. On iPhone specifically, there's a separate step: Settings → Privacy & Security → scroll to Apple Advertising → Reset Advertising Identifier. This resets the ID advertisers use to link your past app activity together, giving you a clean slate going forward.
iOS Location Permissions: The Setting Most People Never Check
Even with Google's own Location History off, individual apps can still request your location directly. Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services shows every app and its current access level. I went through mine and found two apps set to "Always" that had zero reason for constant location access — switched both to "While Using the App," and one I use rarely to "Never" entirely.
Search Engine and Browser: The Bigger Structural Change
Switching Safari's default search engine (Settings → Safari → Search Engine) away from Google to DuckDuckGo cut off a meaningful chunk of routine data collection at the source — I still use Google directly for anything requiring its specific search quality, but casual queries go through DuckDuckGo now by default. For messaging, I moved conversations with a few close contacts to Signal specifically for its default end-to-end encryption. I didn't fully switch away from Google's ecosystem — that felt like more disruption than the privacy gain justified for my situation — but picking off the highest-value pieces (default search, sensitive messaging) felt like a reasonable middle ground.
Quick FAQ
Will turning this off break anything on my phone?
Mostly no. I noticed less-tailored search suggestions and more generic YouTube recommendations — genuine tradeoffs, but core functionality (navigation, search, apps) kept working normally.
Does Incognito mode stop Google from tracking me?
No — it only stops local browsing history from saving to your device. If you're signed into your Google account, your activity can still be logged the same as outside Incognito. Combining a private browsing mode with being signed out, or with a VPN, gets you closer to actual anonymity.
How often should I check these settings?
Every few months, or after a major platform change — Google moved ad settings to a new hub entirely since older guides were written, which is exactly the kind of shift that makes a once-accurate walkthrough stop working without warning.
Conclusion
An hour of actually going through this, rather than just knowing it existed, made a real difference — mostly in what Google's own dashboard would show me if I checked back today. Recommendations got more generic, which was the expected tradeoff, and I'm fine with that exchange for less of my daily routine sitting in a company's database indefinitely.
More honest privacy and security guides like this are up on Tech & Rewards.