Go Update Your Google Privacy And Content Settings Right Now

It’s always a perfectly lovely day to do a privacy self-audit and make sure that your permissions on things like Google and Facebook are everything you hoped and dreamed of. Today, Google made that process extremely easy with their revamp of their My Account page. The revamp divides your account page into three sections: Sign-in and Security, Personal Info and Privacy, and Account Preferences.

Here are some things you should be sure to review, because the new page is so criminally easy that you have no excuse not to.

• Make sure you have a recovery email and recovery phone so Google can reach you in the event your account is hacked or you are locked out.
• Make sure your two-factor authentication is turned on. (You are running two-factor authentication, right??)
• Check your device activity to make sure that all of those things accessing your Google account are indeed your things.
• Check to see what apps you have connected to your Google account. If you are anything like me, you have allowed way too many apps access because it was easy, and now that app list is a graveyard of disused apps that all still have access. Make them go away.
• Check and see if you are storing your search history, your location history, your app activity, your YouTube history, and your Google voice search activity. You may be perfectly happy storing all those things, but if you are not, it takes one click to stop storing them. (My YouTube searches involve a shameful amount of tracking down disco remixes, apparently. I should maybe turn that off.)
• Manage your ad settings. Did you know you could opt out of certain types of ads? Why haven’t you?

You can also dig into less mission-critical things like seeing how much storage you are using and how many bookmarks you have synced. All in all, it is a useful one-stop shop to deal with the Google behemoth.

Go Update Your Google Privacy And Content Settings Right Now was originally published on Lawyerist.