Using Auto Delete on Google.

Over time your tastes and travel routes, and even your opinions, all change — maybe not a lot, but even an incremental change means that the data Google has stored on you is no longer current or timely — and that’s one reason you keep getting those dorky pop ups and cookies for things and people you are no longer interested in.

Google is like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up every bit of interaction you have with the internet, whether from your office computers, your laptop, your tablet, your smartphone, even the smartwatch you got for the Holidays, and turning it into immutable data that drives the offers you see on your screen. You can’t stop Google from collecting it all, but you CAN make sure that it’s up to date by setting the auto delete program in your smartphone, for instance. That way Google will ‘forget’ about past entries and start from scratch with things like voice searches or voice requests with Google Assistant, directions you looked up on Google Maps, and selections for the Google Music app store. 

The current privacy controls for auto delete after six or eighteen months are at myactivity.google.com. One of the newest updates is that it now included YouTube selections — you can auto delete past video selections so they won’t be available to anyone, not even yourself!