Protecting user privacy

Protecting our users’ privacy and security is a responsibility that comes with creating products and services that are accessible for everyone. This is especially important as technology progresses and safety needs evolve. We look to these principles to guide our products, our processes, and our people in keeping our users’ data private, safe, and secure:

1. We never sell your personal information to anyone.

2. We are transparent about what data we collect and why.

3. We make it easy for you to control your personal information.

4. We reduce the data we use to further protect your privacy.

5. We protect you by building products that are secure by default.

6. We build advanced privacy technologies and share them with others.

Learn more about how we keep your personal information private, safe, and secure across all of our products here.

We build controls to help users manage their information so that they can choose the privacy settings that are right for them. For example:

• Using Activity Controls, you can decide what types of activity are tied to your account to personalize your experience across Google services. You can pause specific types of data from being saved in your account—like your Search and browsing activity, YouTube History, or Location History.
• Auto-delete settings let you choose a time limit for how long you want to keep your activity data. Data older than the limit you choose will be continuously and automatically deleted from your account. This makes it easy for you to set it and forget it, but you can always go back and update these settings at any time.
• My Activity is the central place where you can find everything you’ve searched, viewed, and watched using our services. To make it easier to recall your past online activity, we give you tools to search by topic, date, and product. You can permanently delete specific activities or even entire topics that you don’t want associated with your account.
• My Ad Center was designed to give you more control over your ad experience on Google’s sites and apps. When you’re signed into Google, you can access My Ad Center directly from ads on Search, YouTube, and Discover, and choose to see more of the brands and topics you like and less of the ones you don’t.

Protected Computing is a new privacy approach that transforms how, when, and where data is processed to technically ensure the privacy and safety of your data. We do this by:

• Minimizing your data footprint: Leveraging techniques like edge processing and ephemerality, we shrink the amount of your personally identifiable data.
• De-identifying data: Through blurring and randomizing identifiable signals to adding statistical noise, we use a range of anonymization techniques to strip your identity from your data.
• Restricting access: Through technologies like end-to-end encryption and secure enclaves, we help to make it technically impossible for anyone, including Google, to access your sensitive data.

We want to protect our users whenever they’re online by strengthening the security of the entire internet, not just Google products and services. We create some of the world’s most advanced privacy and security technologies and share many of them openly for others to adopt.

• Backing our services with HTTPS encryption ensures you can securely connect to sites and enter your private information like credit card numbers without anyone intercepting your information. We’ll continue investing to make sure our sites and services provide modern HTTPS by default, and we’ll help the rest of the web make the move to HTTPS too by providing tools and resources to all developers.
• The goal of the Privacy Sandbox is to improve web privacy for people around the world, while also giving publishers, creators and other developers the tools they need to build thriving businesses. This includes building new digital advertising tools in collaboration with the wider industry to replace third-party cookies with alternatives that better protect consumer privacy and preserve people’s access to content online.

Our engineers have pioneered and open-sourced numerous privacy preserving technologies. We invented Federated Learning, a new approach to machine learning that enables processing on mobile without centralized training data.

Over the past decade, we’ve also built the world’s largest open-source library of Differential Privacy algorithms, helping everyone from cancer researchers to census analysts apply privacy-preserving technology to their work.

The Global CBPR is a privacy certification that will allow companies to demonstrate their compliance with government-approved requirements for data protection. The Global CBPR system is an important step toward enabling continued, trusted data flows between participating jurisdictions, and Google is committing to certifying under the future Global CBPR system.

We are working with our partners to provide input through the Global CBPR Forum on the practical realities of services facing fragmented privacy regulations.

We are also committed to finding ways to help and support Google customers to certify to this global standard, especially among small and medium enterprises. This kind of support will help scale these key privacy protections to more users, strengthening the businesses of our customers. We will continue to look for ways in the future to support national and international participation in the CBPRs to raise privacy protections for users around the world.

Care Studio is designed to adhere to industry-wide regulations and best practices that protect patient data and govern how data can be used and processed, including HIPAA. Google does not own, nor do we ever sell, patient data. We implement administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect information through the Care Studio.

At Google and YouTube, everything we do for kids, teens, and families is created to empower, designed to respect, and built to protect. We build age-appropriate products that give families flexibility to manage their unique relationships with technology and implement policies, protections and programs that help keep every kid and teen safer online.

Through Family Link, we allow parents to set up supervised accounts for their children, set screen time limits, and more. Our Be Internet Awesome digital literacy program helps kids learn how to be safe and engaged digital citizens, and our dedicated YouTube Kids app, Kids Space and teacher-approved apps in Play offer experiences that are customized for younger audiences.