If you have a computer or phone and you surf the internet, 99.9% also have a Google account. More than Facebook, the Google account is almost essential for surfing the internet and using technological devices.
The Google account is in fact necessary to configure an Android smartphone, to customize Chrome and then to access some of the most used online services in the world such as Youtube, Gmail, search, Google Maps.
The strange fact is that even if everyone has a Google account, few people know that there is a management and administration panel made available to configure the settings of the Google account, fundamental above all from the point of view of security and of privacy.
Google seems to care a lot about security, often inviting users to secure their account by providing different password recovery methods, but it is not as careful to remember that privacy settings exist, often ignored.
In this guide we are going to discover all the settings that must be configured for a Google account, with a brief guide to the main options and the most important ones, although less visible and less known.
To begin checking your Google Account settings, you need to log in to the main portal at myaccount.google.com/ .
The page is very clear and divided into three sections: Security, privacy and general preferences.
For security and privacy settings, you can press Start, at the bottom, to start a control wizard, in order to make configuration very simplified.
By pressing instead on the section title, you enter the general configuration panel.
1) Access and Security
On this page you can start the Google security check, which I had already talked about in the past, which serves to comply with all the recommended procedures to keep the account protected from intrusion and easy to recover in case of password loss or tampering.
Scrolling down there are the two sections:
- Access method and password : to change the password, find out how much is not changed and also to configure the two-step verification.
In this regard, I refer to the guide for accessing Google and Gmail with two-step verification.
Then there are the Account Recovery Options which are an alternate email address and a real phone number.
The security question is no longer used to recover the Google account, therefore, if it was set in the past, it is better to click on it to delete it.
- Device activity and security-related events : to check the latest logins to the Google account, recently used devices and then any problems detected, such as attempts to access from unrecognized locations.
- Apps accessing the account : to control which applications are used via Google account.
In this section you will also find the settings of the password manager, called Smart lock, with the ability to see the passwords stored in Google
2) Personal data and Privacy
In this section you can do the privacy control of the Google account, very important to understand what data is stored by the various services and applications and their visibility to third parties.
The wizard leads above all to configure the privacy settings for Youtube and Google Photos, the history and advertisements.
The Google privacy settings part is divided into three sections:
- Personal information : Name, surname, date of birth and all the rest.
From here you can change the public visibility of this information, on the page //aboutme.google.com/
There are also two important fields, one related to shared recommendations and one for search settings.
- Contacts, it's the Google address book, with email addresses and phone numbers extracted from Gmail and Android smartphone, all data are synchronized online.
- Google activity management : the most important section, that of the general history, where you can find practically everything that has been searched on the internet, on Youtube, in Google Maps and even when using the phone's voice assistant.
Google activity management can be accessed directly from the //myactivity.google.com page and is divided into various parts:
- Web and app activity, which represents the Google history of internet searches.
- Location history, i.e. the places where we were detected by Google Maps on the smartphone
- Device information, with the register of used devices
- Voice and audio activity, with the history of recorded voice commands that can be listened to as audio
- YouTube search history, where you can also clear the history of YouTube searches and viewed videos.
Each of these entries has a switch to suspend the collection of history data and a link to manage all the records and items saved, so as to remove what you do not want to keep (or even all).
- Ad settings : where you can disable the personalization of the advertisements that you see on Google and affiliate sites.
If you disable ad personalization, Google stops monitoring the searches made and the sites visited and will show generic advertisements.
On this page you can also see the topics that Google thinks we are interested in and remove any preferences if they are not true.
It is also possible to indicate a topic that does not interest you, in order never to display advertisements on that topic.
- Content control : where you can use the tool to download all the data in a single archive file containing and where to find the options to manage the account if inactive, which basically allows you to appoint a person as an account trustee in case we we were unable to access (in case of death for example).
3) Google account preferences
On this page, you can configure many Google Account options:
- the payment center, where to indicate the credit card to be used for paid Google products.
- the language to use
- accessibility settings for those who do not see us well (limited to documents and voice search)
- the space available in Google Drive
- the Family group in the Google Play Store
- Elimination of the Google account or elimination of some products from the account and, to be precise, to unsubscribe from Gmail, Youtube and Google+, without however removing the Google account which remains active and usable for everything else (remember that you can create a Google account without Gmail)
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