How to Delete Your Google Account—After Downloading All of Your Data First Leave a comment

Deleting digital accounts that you just hardly ever or by no means use not solely reduces the quantity of litter in your on-line life—it retains you safer too. Each further account you have received is an additional goal for a hacker, an additional database which may leak, and an additional means that somebody may get entry to a few of your larger, extra essential accounts. If you wish to reduce your publicity, hold open solely the accounts you want.

With regards to deleting a Google account, the method is not troublesome or long-winded, and Google will even allow you to obtain your information first. Keep in mind that deleting a Google account wipes out every little thing related along with your Google username, from the emails in Gmail, to the locations you have saved in Google Maps, to the information you have saved to Google Drive.

It is also value noting that Google shuts down accounts mechanically in the event that they have not been used for 2 years, primarily for the safety causes that we have already talked about. If you happen to go to delete a Google account and discover that it is already gone, this is perhaps why—although Google does ship loads of warnings upfront. You possibly can learn extra about Google’s inactive account deletion coverage when you assume this has occurred to your account.

Downloading Your Knowledge

Head to your Google account web page on the internet, and you will see a Knowledge and privateness hyperlink on the left: Click on on this to get an summary of all the information Google has on you (which is perhaps greater than you realized). To get your information off Google’s servers and on to your native laptop, observe the Obtain your information hyperlink towards the underside of the web page.

The following display lets you choose the forms of information you need to export. It contains information from throughout all of Google’s apps and companies, together with shopping historical past saved in Chrome, your Google Calendar appointments, images and movies in Google Images, movies you have uploaded to YouTube, and your Google Chat logs. It exhibits you the complete scope of all the information that’ll be wiped once you delete your Google account.

For busier Google accounts, there is usually a daunting quantity of fabric right here. Use the checkboxes to pick out the classes of information you’d prefer to obtain: The Choose all and Deselect all choices on the high may assist. Some entries within the checklist have choices beneath them to allow you to choose between completely different export codecs, and to pick out explicit subsections of information (equivalent to exercise classes in Google Match) to obtain.

Once you’re pleased along with your choice, click on the Subsequent step button. You then have to decide on the way you need to get your obtain. You will get a obtain hyperlink over e-mail, or have the archive despatched straight to a cloud storage account. You are additionally capable of arrange recurring downloads of the chosen information, which you are not going to need to do when you’re deleting your Google account.