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Turn Off This Parasite on Every Phone! Developers Don’t Want You to Know This | ANDROID MAN Transcript

Polished transcript · ANDROID MAN · 7 Jan 2026 · 3m · @martymcfly

Disable Three Google Privacy Settings to Reduce Tracking and Save Battery

A tech tutorial demonstrating how to turn off data collection features in Android's Google settings.

Summary

A tech presenter walks through three Google settings that Android users can disable to improve privacy, reduce background activity, and potentially extend battery life. The tutorial covers disabling "Usage and Diagnostics" (which collects user behavior data), turning off personalization features across Google apps, and deleting the advertising ID that enables targeted ads. The presenter frames these settings as unnecessary tracking mechanisms that primarily benefit developers and advertisers rather than users.

Key Takeaways

  • Usage and Diagnostics increases background activity — This setting collects data on all user actions and sends it to developers for analysis, creating unnecessary background processes that drain battery without providing benefit to regular users.
  • Personalization settings track behavior across multiple Google apps — Found under "Personalization with general data," these settings allow Google to collect device usage patterns across apps like Maps, Gmail, and Chrome, ostensibly to improve recommendations but primarily to enable more effective advertising.
  • Deleting the advertising ID reduces targeted ads by roughly 50% — The advertising ID enables personalized ad tracking; resetting and then deleting this identifier makes ads more random rather than targeted, significantly reducing their frequency according to the presenter.
  • These changes require navigating through Google account settings — The adjustments are made through Settings > Google > All Services > Privacy and Security, not through individual app settings, making them less obvious to typical users.
  • FULL TRANSCRIPT

    Recommended Privacy Settings to Disable

    Presenter: Hello everyone. I recommend each of you to disable these three Google settings. Be sure to do this to increase security and privacy on your smartphone and thus reduce background activity. You'll even notice that your battery will drain less. This is a useful setting. Friends, please support this video with a like.

    Navigating to Google Privacy Controls

    Presenter: So, let's get started. Go to your main settings, then scroll down to the Google section. Enter this section of your settings to access your Google account. At the top here, there's All Services. Go here. Scroll a little lower to the Privacy and Security section.

    First Setting: Usage and Diagnostics

    Presenter: The first setting, go into it. Usage and Diagnostics, go in here. This setting is absolutely useless for us as users because it only increases background activity and tracks all our actions, collecting data and sending it to our developers for analysis. Be sure to disable this setting. Extra background activity is absolutely unnecessary for us as regular users.

    Second Setting: Personalization with General Data

    Presenter: The next setting is Personalization with General Data. Go in here and make sure to disable everything you find. Here's what it says. Let me read it for you. "Allow Google Apps to use data on your device to make Android even better, such as improving recommendations and suggestions."

    Yes, well done developers. They want to track us to better implement and show us this annoying advertising. Of course, disable all this data that you have here. You may have additional apps here like Maps, Gmail, Chrome. Disable all of these and return back.

    Third Setting: Advertising ID

    Presenter: And the next setting is the last one, the third. Go to the Ad section. Here we have our advertising ID which is used to track us and deliver ads. The first thing I recommend is to press to reset the advertising ID. Reset it. Then delete. Press Delete Advertising ID. Disable it completely.

    Look, ad displays will decrease by about 50%, and that's already good. Ads may be random, but it's better than very frequent annoying ads. This way, we've disabled Google's tracking of us and made our lives a bit easier.


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