What Google Knows About You: A Guide to Your Google Activity Dashboard

Of all the "what does this company know about me" questions, Google's is unusually answerable — because Google actually gives you a dashboard for it. Most people have never opened it, and the amount of detail tends to surprise people the first time they do.

What's actually inside My Activity

• Search history — every search made while signed in, often stretching back years unless auto-delete has been set up.
• Location history / Timeline — if enabled at any point, this can show a detailed record of places visited, sometimes with enough granularity to reconstruct daily routines.
• YouTube watch and search history — which, combined with search history, tends to reveal quite specific interests and habits.
• App and web activity — data from other Google services and, in some cases, partner apps that share activity back to your Google account.

Where to find it

Go to myactivity.google.com while signed into your Google account. From there, you can browse activity chronologically, search within it, and — importantly — set up auto-delete rules so future activity doesn't accumulate indefinitely.

What's worth actually changing

• Set auto-delete. Google allows automatic deletion of activity after 3, 18, or 36 months, which is a reasonable middle ground between full retention and manually deleting everything.
• Turn off Location History if you don't specifically need it, since it's one of the more sensitive categories collected.
• Review connected third-party apps under your Google Account's security settings — many apps request more access than they actually use, similar to the pattern covered in what makes up your digital footprint.

Why this is worth doing even if you're not worried about Google itself

This dashboard is also a useful proxy for understanding your broader digital footprint — if this much detail is retrievable from a single account you use daily, it's a reasonable prompt to think about what other services are quietly building similar profiles without giving you an equivalent dashboard to check. For the sources that don't give you that visibility — old breaches, data brokers, public records tied to your phone number and email — a Scan My Shadow report fills that gap.

Curious what's already out there about you? Scan My Shadow checks your phone number and email across 1,500+ sources and sends you a clear report — no guesswork, just facts. Start your scan.