Using an Android smartphone implies in a certain way giving up a part our private life. As you probably know, we share usage data every time we access services like Google Maps (using its incognito mode avoids this to some extent) or Gmail, the same thing happens when ‘use of social media applications, see Instagram or Facebook. It is therefore advisable to apply certain settings to avoid this.
Google is an expert in collecting user information and it is not in vain that it offers many free services that thus generate profit. One of them is voice search, available on any Android mobile, as well as the Google Assistant. Two different ways to interact with the phone using our voice, although they have a negative counterpart: they save everything we are looking for. This way you can avoid it.
How to stop Google from saving our voice search
Google saves voice searches by default that you do in their products, like Google Assistant or Google Search. This may be useful for some users, allowing them to access their previous searches and improve speech recognition accuracy. However, if you are concerned about your privacy, you may not want Google to record this information.
In summary, let’s see How can we prevent our voice activity from being saved:
- Go to the “My Activity” section of Google. You can do this from the application of the same name or using your main browser and this link.
- Tap “Activity Controls” in the left sidebar. If you don’t see it, you need to click on the menu button illustrated with three horizontal lines.
- Then uncheck the box “Include voice and audio activity.”
Ready! From now on, Google will not save our voice and audio activity, Without exceptions. Yes, we will continue to share other data such as search or app activity, which is also optable.
We have achieved our goal, but we can still reclaim some of our privacy. If you had the box activated, you can proceed to delete audio searches that Google collected. Again, from “My Activity” we will press “Filter by date and product” and from the list we will select “Assistant”. Then just tap “Delete Results”.
Now, going to the extreme, we suggest you apply this change on your Android mobile. It is important to know that we will lose the voice interaction features, even if we do not use them very frequently This may be a good choice for not sharing what we are looking for.
Hold your finger on the “Google” app on the home screen or in the app drawer, then tap “App Info” or similar. On the next screen, go to the “Permissions” section and mark “Microphone” as “Do not allow”. In this way, we will deny access to the microphone to the Google application. Don’t forget to tune it again if you plan to use Google Assistant or voice search.
Cover image | Microsoft Designer Image Creator
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