Whether it's a desire for transparency or a tracking tool, Google recently launched a new page called "My Activity" which shows the entire history of your online activities in interactions with its products and services.
It is common knowledge that most web companies track everything you do on the Internet. This is one of the reasons why you find ads targeted to your tastes when you visit websites (We saw here how to disable targeted ads).
For those of you who would like to track everything you've done online, Google has launched My Activity, a searchable history of all your online activities. My Activity will allow you to find your searches on the web, the sites you have visited as well as all your uses of Google products… on all the platforms you have used: PC, smartphone, tablet…
In terms of practical features, My Activity allows you to perform keyword searches in your activities in order to find in your history any activity linked to these keywords: articles, searches, videos watched on YouTube, applications launched on your Android smartphone, etc.
In addition to this, you can click on each item to get additional information like, for example, the time you visited a web page, the device you visited it on, where you were when you visited it…
Good to know, all saved items can be deleted from your history, one by one or block by block.
Finally, depending on the settings you have enabled on your Google account, My Activity may also save information from third-party sites. For example, if you use Chrome to watch movies on Netflix, My Activity will be able to tell you which movies or series you watched and when.
If you are concerned about your privacy, you can adjust the settings for what My Activity will track in “ Activity-related commands". You can thus activate or deactivate all or part of the tracked elements.
In short, while this tool may seem scary considering how much Google keeps on you, it should rather be seen as a tool that will allow you to control and disable all the information that you do not want Google to have access to!
