How Google protects your privacy and keeps you in control of your ad experience

Whether you’re managing your inbox, browsing the web, or interacting with ads, we know that your privacy is a top priority. That’s why this week, to celebrate Data Privacy Day, we’re highlighting how we keep you safe online – and reminding you of the controls available to you.

First, to keep your private information private, everything we build at Google is secure by default, private by design and keeps you in control. It's how we ensure that everyday, you're Safer with Google.

Your Google Account is a one-stop-shop for your key privacy and security settings. You can control what activity gets saved to your account, download your data, or delete your activity at any time. We’ve also created tools like Dashboard and My Activity, which make it easy to view and control information saved in your Google Account.

To start using these controls, we recommend taking your Privacy Checkup, which helps you choose the settings that are right for you. You can also take a Security Checkup to check your Google Account security status and get personalized recommendations to strengthen your account protection. To learn more about our privacy tools and settings, you can visit our Safety Center.

You’re in control of your ad experience

Our commitment to privacy also applies to your ad experience. We follow a set of core principles about the data we use for ads. For example, we never sell your personal information and we don’t use the content you create, store, and share in apps like Drive, Gmail, and Photos for any ads purposes. It’s simply off limits. We also prohibit advertisers from using sensitive interest categories like personal hardships (including health conditions), identity and beliefs, and sexual interests to target ads.

We’ve also built easy-to-use controls for you in Ad Settings to help you tailor your ad experience by reviewing and updating information in your ads profile. You can even turn off ad personalization altogether.

At the same time, we’ve started rolling out new innovations on features like our “About this ad” menu to help you understand why an ad was shown, and which advertiser ran it. You can report an ad if you believe it violates one of our policies, see the ads a specific verified advertiser has run over the past 30 days, or mute ads or advertisers you aren’t interested in.

Finally, we’ve heard that sometimes there are certain ads you might not want to engage with at all. Currently, you can turn off sensitive ads related to alcohol or gambling on YouTube. We’ll continue to expand our sensitive ad categories soon so that you can choose the ad experience that’s right for you.

Giving you a better ad experience in 2022

This year, we’ll focus on strengthening protections for vulnerable groups, leading the industry towards a more privacy safe future, and delivering new ways to put you in control.

We’ve already made progress on delivering a safer experience to kids and teens online by expanding safeguards to prevent age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens, and we will block ad targeting based on the age, gender, or interests of people under 18.

We’re also collaborating with our industry to define the future of the privacy-safe internet together. Chrome is leading a collaborative effort to make the web private by default with Privacy Sandbox, which seeks to help transform digital marketing in a way that meets your privacy expectations.

Finally, we’ll continue to work on introducing exciting new ways to put you in control of your experiences with our products.