I have a gmail account since 2007 and I have been interested in knowing what data I saved across Google services.

Google has a service that creates archives of the data saved on their servers called takeout: Google Takeout

I have 10GB data on Google servers and I chose to export in tgz format (and unzip with the command 'tar xvf takeout-001.tgx').

My data which I typed or uploaded:

  • Mails are saved in a mbox format
  • Calendars in ics format
  • Bookmarks in Chrome (I don't use Chrome, I think it tried it once in 2013 and imported my bookmarks from Firefox, I didn't expect this data to be on Google servers, this feature is useful for synchronizing bookmarks between devices)
  • Contacts: the list in 'My Contacts' are the cards I created myself and the list in 'All Contacts' are cards created automatically from mails, phone calls,...
  • Documents: I have never used Google Drive but the documents are saved there
  • Google Keep tasks are in HTML format with json metadata
  • Tasks from Gmail
  • My maps in kmz format (I don't know what it is)
  • Profile photos

Other saved data:

  • Activities - A list of Google services accessed by: there is time, location and ip address
  • Google Account: list of login,logout activity, user agent and ip address. Logins on Google websites like gmail.com are saved in this list
  • Device list: PC, mobiles, os version, location and last activity time
  • Android configurations
  • Posts in Google Buzz in pdf format
  • Google play store: devices and mobile operator, installed apps (device, date, operator), reviews, searches, uninstalled apps, visited apps
  • Google Groups: searches, posted to group list, viewed discussions, viewed groups
  • Google Hangouts: recorded chats
  • Location history from mobiles: GPS coordinates, time, source wifi(I don't take my phone with me when I go out and it is always connected to wifi), activity "STILL", "IN_VEHICULE", "UNKNOWN", "TILTING", "ON_BICYCLE", "ON_FOOT", "WALKING" with a confidence number. There are 44000 records between 2015 and 2021
  • Youtube and Google Video: search and watch histories
  • Clicks on Google Ads: url and time
  • Android usage: when apps are open
  • list of viewed books on Google Books with time
  • Calendar keyword searches with time
  • Developer activity: list of pages viewed on GCP,...
  • Searches on Google Finance
  • Google Cloud activity
  • Google play store
  • Image search: keywords, time, which image is viewed
  • Google Maps: searches, viewed areas
  • Google search: searches, visited URLs (from when I created my gmail account in 2007)
  • Google takeout activity

All the activity recoding can be disabled (or 'paused') at: Activity

You can also choose to delete the activity data by clicking on the manage link (I haven't found how to delete the location history, so I selected auto-delete older than 3 months, the last record is older than 3 months).

On Google Accounts Data & Privacy tab tracking can be disabled and data deleted. Accounts.

I could delete the data from Chrome but it is a bit unclear how to delete the data from: alerts, books, calendar, contacts, drive, keep, photos and tasks.

hashtags: #privacy