Deleting digital accounts that you simply hardly ever or by no means use not solely reduces the quantity of litter in your on-line life—it keeps you safer too. Every further account you’ve got obtained is an additional goal for a hacker, an additional database that may leak, and an additional means that somebody would possibly get entry to a few of your greater, extra vital accounts. If you wish to decrease your publicity, maintain open solely the accounts you want.

When it involves deleting a Google account, the method is not tough or long-winded, and Google will even allow you to obtain your knowledge first. Bear in thoughts that deleting a Google account wipes out all the pieces related along with your Google username, from the emails in Gmail, to the locations you’ve got saved in Google Maps, to the information you’ve got saved to Google Drive.

It’s additionally value noting that Google shuts down accounts robotically 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 go to delete a Google account and discover that it is already gone, this may be why—although Google does ship loads of warnings prematurely. You can learn extra about Google’s inactive account deletion policy if you happen to suppose this has occurred to your account.

Downloading Your Data

Head to your Google account page on the net, and you will see a Data and privateness hyperlink on the left: Click on this to get an outline of all the information Google has on you (which may be greater than you realized). To get your knowledge off Google’s servers and on to your native pc, observe the Download your knowledge hyperlink towards the underside of the web page.

The subsequent display lets you choose the varieties of knowledge you wish to export. It consists of knowledge from throughout all of Google’s apps and companies, together with searching historical past saved in Chrome, your Google Calendar appointments, images and movies in Google Photos, movies you’ve got 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 the classes of information you’d prefer to obtain: The Select all and Deselect all choices on the high would possibly assist. Some entries within the record have choices beneath them to allow you to choose between completely different export codecs, and to pick explicit subsections of information (corresponding to exercise classes in Google Fit) to obtain.

When you are joyful along with your choice, click on the Next step button. You then have to decide on the way you wish to get your obtain. You can get a obtain hyperlink over electronic mail, or have the archive despatched straight to a cloud storage account. You’re additionally capable of arrange recurring downloads of the chosen knowledge, which you are not going to wish to do if you happen to’re deleting your Google account.