Google Offers New Way For Users To Manage Ads, Personal Data

But it might be worth popping on to Activity, logging in (you probably already are) and seeing just how much of your digital life is there to be searched.

Google has launched a My Activity website that shows users their activity on the internet.

While it might be eerie seeing your entire web history in this much detail, Google deserves props for being transparent while putting plenty of control in your hands. This page displays a chronological timeline of all the websites you visited and search requests. But if you choose not to use an ad blocker and are therefore going to be bombarded with ads, they might as well be ads that are relevant to you, right?

Not everything is here; for example, the aforementioned Maps history is located on a different page. Check out the source links below to find out more about how you can control it.

To view the dashboard, simply visit myactivity.google.com, where you’ll see a running list of your recent web activity organized by day.

In the upcoming future, Google plans to use data from how you used Google services to show you ads across the Web, according to a Wired report. Google has previously done it on its own services, but this has now been expanded to third-party sites as well.

Those customized ads shown alongside Google’s search results and the content on millions of other websites have turned Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc, into one of the world’s most profitable companies.

For those of us who want a more in-depth look at what we’ve done online, beyond what a simple search history would provide, Google has introduced My Activity, a searchable history of your online activities. You can also update your basic demographics, age and gender, and toggle on or off if you want ads to be targeted based on these interests. They have a new page, called My Activity, which will allow users to have some control over their profile. Take advantage of being in charge of what you want to see and the information that is part of your search history archives. Otherwise, ads are based on factors like location and are generally less relevant.

The new options are being gradually rolled out; we’ve seen them on some accounts while they were absent on others.