There are 71 of them — scattered across your account, Chrome, YouTube, Gemini, Photos, Play and Meta, on pages that never link to each other. Privacy Guard opens them one at a time, in order, and scores what you are still sharing. Start the clock and run a few of them here first.
Nothing here touches your account. You decide; the app opens the real switch.
You sign in to your own Google account inside the app. There is no Privacy Guard account, nothing is stored on a server, and every change is made by you.
The app's checkup screen, mid-run.
A rehearsal, not a remote control — nothing on this page can reach your account, and it never asks you to sign in to anything. You will see the real setting, what it actually collects, and what you genuinely give up by switching it off. Then you decide.
Which of these do you actually use?
Those are the ones every Google account has, whatever you use it for. Tick what you actually use above and the number moves.
The interest profile Google writes about you
A readable list of what Google has decided you are interested in — often uncomfortably specific, assembled from your searches, videos and the sites you visit.
Nothing you would miss. You still see the same number of ads; they stop being aimed using your profile.
Everything you have typed into Google, kept and searchable
Your searches and what you do inside Google apps, each entry stamped with a date and time, going back years and readable in one scroll.
Autocomplete and results get a little more generic, and you lose the ability to look up something you searched last spring.
A dated map of everywhere your phone has been
A timeline of your movements — the school run, the clinic, the hotel, how long you stayed. One switch, several levels deep, on a page nothing ever links to.
Maps stops keeping your Timeline and stops offering commute predictions. Navigation, saved places and live traffic all keep working.
What you watched, what you searched, and who can see it
Every video you opened and every search you made, driving recommendations across your whole account — and, separately, whether your subscriptions and playlists are public.
Recommendations reset to generic and "continue watching" stops following you between devices. Subscriptions themselves are unaffected.
What your AI conversations save, and for how long
Your conversations, kept on a retention setting you can shorten or switch off, plus a separate list of things Gemini has saved about you and the apps it can reach.
Gemini stops referring back to earlier chats, so long-running threads start fresh each time.
Browsing history, passwords and addresses, copied to your account
Whatever you left switched on: history, bookmarks, saved passwords, addresses and payment methods, held against your Google account rather than only on the device.
Real cost, this one. Tabs, bookmarks and passwords stop following you between devices — so turn off the categories you do not need rather than all of it.
Face grouping, place data, and albums you forgot were shared
Faces grouped and named across your library, locations attached to photos, and any album still reachable by a link you sent someone years ago.
Searching your library by person or place stops working. Revoking an old shared link only affects people you no longer meant to share with.
What you bought, what is still charging you, and which cards are stored
An order history going back to your first Android phone, saved cards, and subscriptions renewing quietly in the background — including ones you stopped using.
A minute. Removing a card means re-entering it next time you buy something; cancelling a subscription is exactly as final as it sounds.
Every tool you once let read your files still can
The PDF signer you used once, the mail merge add-on, the CV builder — each holding standing permission to open your Drive, listed on a page most people have never opened.
Anything you still use will ask for permission again the next time you open it. Anything you do not use costs you nothing at all.
What other apps and sites report back about you
Every app or site you signed into with Facebook, plus the activity businesses send back to Meta about you from outside the app entirely.
A handful of "Log in with Facebook" accounts may need a password reset. Ads get less specific, which is the point.
Every app you ever signed in with is still on the list
Every "Continue with Google" you have ever tapped, each one holding standing access to a slice of your account — contacts, calendar, files — years after you stopped using it.
Apps you still use will ask you to sign in once more. Apps you have forgotten cost you nothing.
The one on this list you turn on, not off
Everything above is about what your account shares. This is about who can get into it. A leaked password on its own stops being enough.
One extra tap when you sign in on a device you have not used before. That is the whole cost.
Nothing on this page touched your account — it could not, and it never asked you to sign in. The app does the same eight for real, then the rest, opening each official page so you make the change yourself in your own account.
Every one of these is an official Google, Chrome or Meta control that already exists in your account. Privacy Guard's whole job is knowing where they live and opening them in order.
71 controls, nine areas, not one of them on the same screen as the next. Finding them is the work. That is the entire reason this app exists — and why the free checkup covers all of Google, with Meta and the change tracking in Pro.
This is the part nobody warns you about. A control you turned off two years ago is quietly recording again, because something ordinary happened in between.
Setup asks a dozen questions in a row and you tap Agree to get through them. Several of those taps were privacy settings.
History and location often returnAdding your account to a tablet, a car, a work laptop. Each device carries its own defaults, and the defaults are on.
Device-level activity comes backA feature launches with a new control that did not exist when you last looked, already switched on, in a menu you have never visited.
A switch you have never seenThe notice you dismissed on a Tuesday morning reorganised the settings pages and reset a few of the choices underneath.
Old preferences quietly resetSo Privacy Guard keeps the score over time, reminds you when it is worth looking again, and tells you exactly what changed since your last checkup. Two minutes, a few times a year.
Get the appThe privacy aisle is full of apps promising invisibility. This one is smaller than that, and straight about where it stops.
We would rather tell you what the app cannot do than sell you a shield that isn't there. Everything here is navigation and comprehension — knowing which switches exist, where they live, and what each one actually means. The switches themselves belong to Google and Meta, and always will. The Google checkup and the privacy score are free; tracking changes over time, the Meta settings and an ad-free experience are $1.99 a month, or $14.99 once.
Short answers to the things people search for before they look for an app. Every setting named here is an official Google or Meta control, in your own account.
A Google privacy checkup is a pass through the privacy controls attached to your Google account — activity history, ad personalization, location, connected apps and sign-in security — deciding what each one should be set to. Google runs its own Privacy Checkup inside your account. Privacy Guard covers a wider list: 71 controls across Google, Chrome, YouTube, Gemini, Photos, Drive, Play and Meta.
Turn off Web & App Activity. It sits in your Google account under Data & privacy → Activity controls, and directly at myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols. Switching it off stops new searches and in-app activity being saved to your account, and the same panel offers “Turn off and delete activity” to clear what is already there. Autocomplete and results become a little more generic afterwards.
Go to myadcenter.google.com and switch off Personalized ads. Google then stops using the activity saved to your account to pick which ads you see; you get the same number of ads, chosen on general signals such as the topic of the page instead. My Ad Center also lets you switch off individual data signals one at a time under Manage privacy.
Location History is now called Timeline, and since 2025 Google keeps it on your phone rather than in the cloud. You manage it in the Google Maps app under Your Timeline → Location & privacy settings; the control itself lives at myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols/location. You can delete the whole Timeline or single days. Turning Timeline off does not remove location saved by Web & App Activity — that is a separate switch.
YouTube watch history and YouTube search history are two separate switches, both held in your Google account and reachable from myactivity.google.com under YouTube History. Pausing watch history stops new videos being recorded and empties the recommendations on your YouTube home page — that is the real cost. Subscriptions, playlists and liked videos are untouched, and turning it back on restores recommendations.
Eighteen months by default. In Gemini’s activity settings, or at myactivity.google.com under Gemini Apps, you can change that to 3 or 36 months, or stop conversations being saved at all. Google states that even with saving switched off, conversations are held for up to 72 hours so the service can run and process feedback; those do not appear in your activity list.
Open myaccount.google.com/connections. It lists every app and service you have ever signed into with Google and what each one can reach — Drive files, contacts, calendar — with a Remove access control on each. Revoking stops future access; it does not delete data an app already copied. Anything you still use simply asks you to sign in again next time you open it.
Meta retired it. The control launched as Off-Facebook Activity in 2019, was renamed “Your activity off Meta technologies”, and in June 2026 Meta announced it was being replaced by an expanded Activity from other businesses setting. The replacement governs how that activity is used to personalise ads and content rather than disconnecting it from your account, so it is worth re-checking what your Meta settings now say.
Usually because something ordinary reset a default, not because anything was done behind your back. A new phone whose setup asks a dozen questions in a row; an account added to a tablet, car or work laptop that carries its own defaults; a product shipping a control that did not exist last time you looked; a terms update that reorganised the settings pages. That is why a checkup is worth repeating.
No. It opens the official Google or Meta settings page for each control, in order, and you make the change yourself inside your own account. There is no Privacy Guard account and nothing is stored on a server. What the app adds is knowing which 71 controls exist, where each one lives, what each one costs you, and how many are still switched on.
The Google checkup and the privacy score are free on both iOS and Android. Tracking how your settings change between checkups, the 17 Meta controls and an ad-free experience are the paid tier — $1.99 a month or $14.99 once. Neither tier needs a Privacy Guard account: you sign in to your own Google account inside the app.
No to both. Nothing is proxied, routed or encrypted on your behalf, and no app can make you anonymous to a service you are signed into or undo data already collected. Privacy Guard is navigation and comprehension: which switches exist, where they live, what turning each one off actually costs, and which of them are still on right now.
Setting names and locations are the ones published by Google and Meta and do change — the app follows them. Privacy Guard is an independent app by Dolev Franko, not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Google LLC or Meta Platforms, Inc.
You have seen how one of them goes. The rest are the same, in order, in your own account — and by the end you will know what it has been collecting, and every switch you decided to turn off will be off.