Who is tracking me

The third category in Activity controls is Device Information. You can only wipe the entire history here—by clicking Delete all —rather than individual items. It's here that all your Google Assistant commands, whether said to your phone or to a smart speaker, get stored. If you click Manage activity , you get a list of everything you've said, and even the option to play back the audio recording. Click the three dots to the side of a recording to delete it, the trash can icon to delete an entire day, or the Delete activity by link on the left to wipe everything from this category at once.

You do have options when it comes to temporarily stopping Google tracking you, as well—staying signed out when using YouTube for example, not signing into Google Chrome, or using incognito mode when searching and browsing in Chrome.

These measures will stop activity showing up in your Google account. That's not quite everything: Google also keeps tabs on Gmail messages to monitor your purchases, your trips, your flights, and your upcoming bills. This has been going on for a long time, and has been well documented in the past, though it's recently been the subject of a flurry of news reports. You can see more of this data here , or search for it on the Google search page, if you're signed in. Try "my purchases," "my flights," "my trips," or "my bills," for example—all this data is pulled from your Gmail account, and obviously doesn't show up for anyone else when they search Google.

It's this kind of deep digging that lets Google warn you when your flight is delayed, or when a delivery is about to turn up, or when a bill is due, typically through the Google Assistant.

The most efficient way to stop this from happening is to delete the emails from your Gmail account; otherwise it comes as part of using the service. In Google's eyes, you might want to quickly call up your recent purchases, or your upcoming flights, so it's providing a useful service—but it's a little unnerving to discover that so much of your life has been catalogued and logged, even if the information inside Gmail isn't used to serve up targeted ads.

Speaking of advertising, head here to see the ad profile that Google has built up on you. Again, you'll have to be signed in. At the top is your age and gender, followed by a whole host of topics that Google thinks you're interested in—click on any of these entries and choose Turn off to strike it from the record. To opt out of ad personalization completely, use the toggle switch at the top of the page.

Note that this won't reduce the number of ads you see, nor will it affect the amount of data Google collects on you. So how can our data be used? Our data can be copied, analysed, stored, combined with other data, shared and sold to others — advertisers, companies, government. Search Go. My Privacy UK Who is tracking me. Return to home page Or explore the fun resources below. It's also used to improve your internet experience as a whole.

Even mobile apps and browser extensions can track your activity. There are several browser extensions available that claim to help you see who is tracking your web-surfacing habits, but many of them invasively track themselves.

The following ones are recommended as safe to use, in that they either help protect you or let you know who is tracking you - while not tracking themselves, or, if they do, it's minimally so. This plugin forces it to use encryption, which helps protect your online purchases, payment details, and general web surfing from malicious actors who are eavesdropping for theft purposes.

It monitors third parties and ad networks that try to track you through cookies and digital fingerprinting and can even auto-block them. Invisible trackers that monitor you can also be easily blocked with Disconnect. You can also specify which domains to trust and whitelist.

We also like it use of "masked cards" in the premium version. These throwaway virtual cards are used at online vendors in place of your credit card data. Remember, it's very hard to escape data collection and surveillance. If you use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, be aware most of these online services track you and only recently began adopting end-to-end encryption.

Every big tech company - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple - has even been caught using contractors in the past to listen to user conversations recorded by their apps and assistants. There's no way to get around it: Browsers are at the heart of data collection.

Ad networks track you across sites, while internet provider log the pages you visit, and hackers try to use insecure Wi-Fi connections and unencrypted websites to successfully gain access to you and harvest data.