YOUR PRIVACY CONTROLS
You have choices regarding the information we collect and how it's used
This section describes key controls for managing your privacy across our services. You can also visit the Privacy Checkup, which provides an opportunity to review and adjust important privacy settings. In addition to these tools, we also offer specific privacy settings in our products — you can learn more in our Product Privacy Guide.
Go to Privacy Checkup
Managing, reviewing, and updating your information
When you’re signed in, you can always review and update information by visiting the services you use. For example, Photos and Drive are both designed to help you manage specific types of content you’ve saved with Google.
We also built a place for you to review and control information saved in your Google Account. Your Google Account includes:
Privacy controls
Activity Controls
Decide what types of activity you’d like saved in your account. For example, if you have YouTube History turned on, the videos you watch and the things you search for are saved in your account so you can get better recommendations and remember where you left off. And if you have Web & App Activity turned on, your searches and activity from other Google services are saved in your account so you can get more personalized experiences like faster searches and more helpful app and content recommendations. Web & App Activity also has a subsetting that lets you control whether information about your activity on other sites, apps, and devices that use Google services, such as apps you install and use on Android, is saved in your Google Account and used to improve Google services.
Go to Activity Controls
Ad settings
Manage your preferences about the ads shown to you on Google and on sites and apps that partner with Google to show ads. You can modify your interests, choose whether your personal information is used to make ads more relevant to you, and turn on or off certain advertising services.
Go to My Ad Center
About you
Manage personal info in your Google Account and control who can see it across Google services.
Go to About You
Shared endorsements
Choose whether your name and photo appear next to your activity, like reviews and recommendations, that appear in ads.
Go to Shared Endorsements
Sites and apps that use Google services
Manage information that websites and apps using Google services, like Google Analytics, may share with Google when you visit or interact with their services.
Go to How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services
Ways to review & update your information
My Activity
My Activity allows you to review and control data that’s saved to your Google Account when you’re signed in and using Google services, like searches you’ve done or your visits to Google Play. You can browse by date and by topic, and delete part or all of your activity.
Go to My Activity
Google Dashboard
Google Dashboard allows you to manage information associated with specific products.
Go to Dashboard
Your personal information
Manage your contact information, such as your name, email, and phone number.
Go to Personal Info
When you’re signed out, you can manage information associated with your browser or device, including:
Signed-out search personalization: Choose whether your search activity is used to offer you more relevant results and recommendations.
YouTube settings: Pause and delete your YouTube Search History and your YouTube Watch History.
Ad Settings: Manage your preferences about the ads shown to you on Google and on sites and apps that partner with Google to show ads.
Exporting, removing & deleting your information
You can export a copy of content in your Google Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Google.
Export your data
To delete your information, you can:
Delete your content from specific Google services
Search for and then delete specific items from your account using My Activity
Delete specific Google products, including your information associated with those products
Delete your entire Google Account
Delete your information
Inactive Account Manager allows you to give someone else access to parts of your Google Account in case you’re unexpectedly unable to use your account.
And finally, you can also request to remove content from specific Google services based on applicable law and our policies.
There are other ways to control the information Google collects whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account, including:
Browser settings: For example, you can configure your browser to indicate when Google has set a cookie in your browser. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. But remember that our services rely on cookies to function properly, for things like remembering your language preferences.
Device-level settings: Your device may have controls that determine what information we collect. For example, you can modify location settings on your Android device.
SHARING YOUR INFORMATION
When you share your information
Many of our services let you share information with other people, and you have control over how you share. For example, you can share videos on YouTube publicly or you can decide to keep your videos private. Remember, when you share information publicly, your content may become accessible through search engines, including Google Search.
When you’re signed in and interact with some Google services, like leaving comments on a YouTube video or reviewing an app in Play, your name and photo appear next to your activity. We may also display this information in ads depending on your Shared endorsements setting.
When Google shares your information
We do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of Google except in the following cases:
With your consent
We’ll share personal information outside of Google when we have your consent. For example, if you use Google Home to make a reservation through a booking service, we’ll get your permission before sharing your name or phone number with the restaurant. We also provide you with controls to review and manage third party apps and sites you have given access to data in your Google Account. We’ll ask for your explicit consent to share any sensitive personal information.
With domain administrators
If you’re a student or work for an organization that uses Google services, your domain administrator and resellers who manage your account will have access to your Google Account. They may be able to:
Access and retain information stored in your account, like your email
View statistics regarding your account, like how many apps you install
Change your account password
Suspend or terminate your account access
Receive your account information in order to satisfy applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request
Restrict your ability to delete or edit your information or your privacy settings
For external processing
We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help operate our data centers, deliver our products and services, improve our internal business processes, and offer additional support to customers and users. We also use service providers to help review YouTube video content for public safety and analyze and listen to samples of saved user audio to help improve Google’s audio recognition technologies.
For legal reasons
We will share personal information outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
Respond to any applicable law, regulation,legal process, or enforceable governmental request. We share information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in our Transparency Report.
Enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users, or the public.
We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners — like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. For example, we share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. We also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies.
If Google is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
KEEPING YOUR INFORMATION SECURE
We build security into our services to protect your information
All Google products are built with strong security features that continuously protect your information. The insights we gain from maintaining our services help us detect and automatically block security threats from ever reaching you. And if we do detect something risky that we think you should know about, we’ll notify you and help guide you through steps to stay better protected.
We work hard to protect you and Google from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of information we hold, including:
We use encryption to keep your data private while in transit
We offer a range of security features, like Safe Browsing, Security Checkup, and 2 Step Verification to help you protect your account
We review our information collection, storage, and processing practices, including physical security measures, to prevent unauthorized access to our systems
We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.
EXPORTING & DELETING YOUR INFORMATION
You can export a copy of your information or delete it from your Google Account at any time
You can export a copy of content in your Google Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Google.
Export your data
To delete your information, you can:
Delete your content from specific Google services
Search for and then delete specific items from your account using My Activity
Delete specific Google products, including your information associated with those products
Delete your entire Google Account
Delete your information
RETAINING YOUR INFORMATION
We retain the data we collect for different periods of time depending on what it is, how we use it, and how you configure your settings:
Some data you can delete whenever you like, such as your personal info or the content you create or upload, like photos and documents. You can also delete activity information saved in your account, or choose to have it deleted automatically after a set period of time. We’ll keep this data in your Google Account until you remove it or choose to have it removed.
Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically after a set period of time, such as advertising data in server logs.
We keep some data until you delete your Google Account, such as information about how often you use our services.
And some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or financial record-keeping.
When you delete data, we follow a deletion process to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems.
You can read more about Google’s data retention periods, including how long it takes us to delete your information.
COMPLIANCE & COOPERATION WITH REGULATORS
We regularly review this Privacy Policy and make sure that we process your information in ways that comply with it.
Data transfers
We maintain servers around the world and your information may be processed on servers located outside of the country where you live. Data protection laws vary among countries, with some providing more protection than others. Regardless of where your information is processed, we apply the same protections described in this policy. We also comply with certain legal frameworks relating to the transfer of data.
When we receive formal written complaints, we respond by contacting the person who made the complaint. We work with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of your data that we cannot resolve with you directly.
ABOUT THIS POLICY
When this policy applies
This Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Google LLC and its affiliates, including YouTube, Android, and services offered on third-party sites, such as advertising services. This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to:
The information practices of other companies and organizations that advertise our services
Services offered by other companies or individuals, including products or sites they offer that may include Google services to which the policy applies, or products or sites displayed to you in search results, or linked from our services
Changes to this policy
We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We always indicate the date the last changes were published and we offer access to archived versions for your review. If changes are significant, we’ll provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes).
