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 muddle in your on-line life—it keeps you safer too. Each further account you have bought 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 greater, extra necessary accounts. If you wish to decrease your publicity, hold open solely the accounts you want.

With regards to deleting a Google account, the method is not tough or long-winded, and Google will even allow you to obtain your information first. Keep in mind that deleting a Google account wipes out the whole lot related together 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 price 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. In case you go to delete a Google account and discover that it is already gone, this is likely to be why—although Google does ship loads of warnings prematurely. You possibly can learn extra about Google’s inactive account deletion policy for those who suppose this has occurred to your account.

Downloading Your Information

Head to your Google account page on the internet, and you may see a Information and privateness hyperlink on the left: Click on on this to get an outline of all the information Google has on you (which is likely to be 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 subsequent display screen lets you choose the kinds of information you need to export. It consists of information from throughout all of Google’s apps and providers, together with searching historical past saved in Chrome, your Google Calendar appointments, images and movies in Google Pictures, movies you have uploaded to YouTube, and your Google Chat logs. It reveals 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 knowledge you’d prefer to obtain: The Choose all and Deselect all choices on the prime may assist. Some entries within the record have choices beneath them to allow you to decide between completely different export codecs, and to pick out explicit subsections of knowledge (comparable to exercise classes in Google Match) to obtain.

Whenever you’re completely happy together 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 for those who’re deleting your Google account.