How To Guide: “Google Stores Your Voice Search History—Here’s How to Delete & Prevent It for Good”

For your digital literacy folder.
As a new step-by-step guide points out Google has been saving and storing your search queries for years (unless you’ve turned this feature off).
What might not be as well-known is that Google Voice Search (speak your query) is also saving and storing (on Google’s servers) your queries. In other words, Google is saving and storing audio recordings of your voice asking your query.
The good news is that the saving of your Google Voice searches can be turned off permanently (if desired) and the recordings (if any) deleted from Google’s servers.
The guide provides a step-by-step look at how to accomplish the task in only a few clicks.
Note: It’s possible to opt-out of Google saving and storing your Google Voice queries but still be able to use Google Voice Search.
From the Guide:

It’s no secret that Google stores your search history in order to provide you with targeted ads when surfing the web. What’s even more interesting (or freaky) is that your Google Now voice searches are also being stored, and you can actually listen to them right now.
So why do they need to store your voice recordings? According to Google, it’s to “help recognize your voice and improve speech recognition.” But if this level of data mining doesn’t sit well with you, here’s how you delete your recordings and prevent them from being stored in the first place.

Btw, another guide from Wonder How To shares directions about how to remove your location history from Apple Maps, Google Maps, & Waze
Direct to: “Google Stores Your Voice Search History—Here’s How to Delete & Prevent It for Good”
Note: To remove your search history (searches that you’ve typed) and other data that Google has stored about you/your account, visit the Google Privacy Dashboard.

Filed under: Dashboards, Data Files, Maps, News