Clean Utility Toolkit

"Depending on the products you're using and settings you choose, Google may use different types of location information to help make some services and products you use more helpful. These include: GPS and other sensor data from your device; IP address; Activity on Google services, such as from your searches or places you label like home or work; Information about things near your device, such as Wi-Fi access points, cell towers, and Bluetooth-enabled devices."

Google collects location data through virtually every available method — GPS, IP address, WiFi access points, cell towers, Bluetooth devices, and sensor data — creating comprehensive location tracking across multiple signals.

"The information we collect includes unique identifiers, browser type and settings, device type and settings, operating system, mobile network information including carrier name and phone number, and application version number. We also collect information about the interaction of your apps, browsers, and devices with our services, including IP address, crash reports, system activity, and the date, time, and referrer URL of your request."

Google collects a broad range of device information including unique identifiers, phone numbers, carrier names, installed apps, crash reports, and system activity — well beyond what is needed for any single service's core functionality.

"We may use the information we collect across our services and across your devices for the purposes described above. For example, depending on your available settings, if you watch videos of guitar players on YouTube, you might see an ad for guitar lessons on a site that uses our ad products. Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google's services and the ads delivered by Google."

Google explicitly links user activity across all its services, devices, and third-party websites and apps that use Google services, building unified profiles for ad targeting and personalization.

"We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help operate our data centers, deliver our products and services, improve our internal business processes, and offer additional support to customers and users."

Google shares personal information with affiliates, trusted businesses, service providers, and partners for processing, advertising, measurement, and research purposes — a broad range of third-party data sharing.

"We keep some data until you delete your Google Account, such as information about how often you use our services. And some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or financial record-keeping. When you delete data, we follow a deletion process to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems."

Google retains certain data for the lifetime of the account and beyond, with vague justifications like 'legitimate business purposes,' and acknowledges delays in actual deletion from backup systems even after user-initiated deletion.

"We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We always indicate the date the last changes were published and we offer access to archived versions for your review. If changes are significant, we'll provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes)."

While Google commits to not reducing rights without consent, they can still make other changes to the policy unilaterally, with continued use implicitly constituting acceptance of non-rights-reducing changes.