How to turn off Google Location History

 Where does Google save the sites I have visited and for what?

Google is a company that bases a large part of its income on knowing its users. By "knowing" we mean knowing what they like, where they have been and what their preferences are when, for example, buying online. Google stores a large amount of information for each user who has an active Google account . Just by having an Android smartphone with its account activated, the giant will know more about you than you think, unless you have previously deactivated the information storage histories, which are activated as standard.

For the average user there is a great lack of knowledge about whether they can hide from Google and how to do it , so in this guide we will try to explain in a simple and step-by-step way how to deactivate Google's location history .

Google maintains an ambitious program to store information about its users. This information is then used to offer you personalized and more relevant ads, as well as faster and related searches.with what you have previously visited. In the case of saving the locations where you have been physically, Google uses them to offer first hand information to other users who visit them. For example, if you have been to a specific airport and a user has doubts about some aspect related to it (when it closes, what is there to eat, if there are VIP areas...), Google will show you notifications when a user asks about it, so that you can answer him and thus create an information center of that site of users who have previously been in the same place.

In this case, with the location history activated in Google, we will also have access to all the places that we have visited for many years. Google stores the places you have visited based on the time you have been standing in them and photos you have taken , among others. It should be noted that even if you have GPS deactivated, Google will still locate you through mobile data , perhaps with a certain error, but it will. This is why many users do not know to what extent Google knows where they have been, but it can be easily seen through My Activity.

How to turn off Google location history

By clicking on this link we will go to Google My Activity , which is the information center in which the company collects all the data from us. In the list on the left we click on Other Google activity.

In the new window we will see more categories, we are interested in the third, Location History . If we click on Manage sites, we can change the work and home addresses that we have assigned. This is assigned by Google automatically based on the time you spend on each site, so the information that appears there may be wrong.

However, what interests us is to deactivate these types of locations to make Google not know where we have been . We will find this in the previous window, in Manage activity, and a new tab will open.

This is where any normal person would start to think that Google knows too much, more than we would like. This screen shows all the locations you have been to for many years, as many as a smartphone with a Google account you carry. As we said, this option is activated by default and can only be deactivated if we enter this My Activity portal, which is something that many people do not know about.

If we click on the red sign, where in my case it says 480 sites, we can see one by one the locations that Google has saved, as well as the day we visit them . What interests us is the third poster, where it acclaims Google's location history is activated. We click on it and it takes us to another website that looks like this.

If we now click on the sliding button, it will ask us for a confirmation, we give Pause and that's it, we have already deactivated the Google location history. However, this does not delete all the locations that it already has previously saved , so if we want it to not have anything stored on us we can go to the previous window (the map, go backwards in the browser itself) and click on the wheel that appears at the bottom right on the map itself.

There we can choose to delete all locations (Delete all location history) or delete only those that are old (Delete location history automatically). It will ask you for confirmation for the first, and select an option in the case of the second. We can choose to automatically delete locations older than 3 or 18 months , but it will continue to store new sites that we visit until that time has passed and they are automatically deleted. Anyway, the option we are looking for is to erase everything(the fourth option of the wheel drop-down menu) and with this and having deactivated the location history as well, Google will no longer save the sites we visit.

You can also make a backup copy of this data before deleting it , in order to have it stored on our PC for our own use. The last option on the wheel will take us to make this backup, in which as much data as we have selected categories will be saved.

Will Google no longer save more data about me?

Once these changes are made, we will be disconnected from Google in terms of locations . There is, however, more data that Google saves about us, such as searches we carry out on the internet, websites we visit, videos we play, purchases we make ... which can also be deleted, as well as deactivated so that it does not continue to store them. In case you are interested in this too, you can take a look at this other guide where we explain step by step how to make Google not save anything about us .