I’ve found helpful guides for de-googling here, but I wasn’t able to find any for limiting the personal data that is shared with Google before making the switch to other services.
I’d greatly appreciate if anyone could link me to existing guidance or offer guidance here. Some questions I have:
- If you’ve de-googled, were you able to clear out any of your data from wherever Google captures it?
- Does Google allow you to clear out data upon account deactivation?
- What is the extent of control we have (if any) over our personal data once Google has captured it? Once Google has sold it elsewhere?
I think they provide tools to do this. You can do google takeout, then set your privacy settings to delete after X amount of time. We can hold good faith that they do so? Other than that, i guess you can contact them?
AFAIK Google is the biggest advertising platform on the planet and the idea that anyone could delete all their content from that platform is not one that I’d consider likely.
I’m happy to be proven wrong, in fact I’d be delighted to be wrong.
Just delete everything in your account settings and pray they actually do. It’s not like they’ll let you audit their servers to confirm they did.
One example which was hard for me to remove, at least in bulk: contributions to Google Maps (photos). I also answered survey questions about POI and I dont think they can be removed at all.
All before I discovered OSM…