Stop Google Tracking Your Location

keeps is your location data.

Doing a Google search or using Google Maps gives the company your location to pinpoint accuracy. Why does Google want this? To serve you more relevant ads and search results and so on, but for some people, that's an unacceptable privacy tradeoff.

Here's how to stop handing over your location data to Google.

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• Fire up your browser, and go to Google.com.
• Click on your profile pic and sign into your account.
• Click on your profile pic followed by Manage your Google Account
• From Privacy & Personalization, select Manage your data & personalization
• Go to Activity controls and select Manage your activity controls
• Go to Web & App Activity and switch the toggle to off
• On the screen that follows (a screen explaining the downsides to turning this feature off), click Pause

Phew! That was a long trip!

But what about all the location data Google has collected? That's still stored, but if you want to delete it, here's how (we have to retrace some of our steps!):

• Fire up your browser, and go to Google.com.
• Click on your profile pic followed by Manage your Google Account
• From Privacy & Personalization, select Manage your data & personalization
• Go to Activity controls and select Location History
• Select Manage activity to go to your Google Timeline
• Click on the settings icon to the left of a button marked Map, and from the pop-up select Delete all Location History
• Confirm that you do indeed want to delete location data, and click Delete Location History