www.androidpolice.com How to delete your Google account once and for all

Backing up your data is quick and easy, too

There are any number of reasons why someone would want to delete their Google account. Maybe it's an old account from high school, and you have moved on to a more "adult" account. Maybe you're overwhelmed by the amount of newsletters you have signed up for and just want to start afresh. Maybe you have had it with Google and want to find a service provider that prioritizes data privacy.

Whatever your reasoning, actually deleting your Google account is surprisingly easy. You can either choose to delete individual services (Gmail, YouTube, etc.) or you can mass-delete everything all at once. In this guide, we will show you how to do both, as well as how to back up your data before you wipe your account.

Backing up your data

Even if you don't think it's necessary, it's a good idea to download your data as a backup. If you want to create another Google account with this data or move it to another service provider, this backup will be necessary to ensure you get everything you need.

To back up your Google account data, follow these steps:

Deleting specific Google services

Now that your data is safely backed up, it's time to start cleaning house. If you're just looking to ditch a certain Google service, you can do so without deleting your entire account.

To delete specific Google services, follow these steps:

Your account for that service will be deleted and removed from your Google account.

Deleting your entire Google account

If you want your entire Google account to go dark, Google lets you do it without any hassle. Follow these instructions:

What happens when I delete my account?

According to Google's privacy policy, when you instruct the company to delete your data, it'll either remove it from its servers entirely or retain only anonymous information, though it may take some time:

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. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems.

As you can see, deleting your Google account is a surprisingly simple process. For more Google advice (that you may or may not need after reading this guide), check out our posts on how to use the Nest Audio or Nest Hub as a Bluetooth speaker and how to check for a software update on your Pixel 6.