Google Account Activity adds password protection option to keep prying eyes at bay

A new security option has appeared in your account settings which is a part of the Safer with Google initiative. You can now add an extra layer of verification to your account activity page to make certain no one can see your personal information on shared devices that you may have left yourself signed in on.

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If you turn on extra verification, Google will make sure it’s really you before you can see or delete your full history on My Activity. This can help keep your history safer on shared devices.

This setting applies to My Activity. Your history may still appear in other Google products.

By scrolling down and clicking the prompt, you can start the process of protecting the details of your activity on the web. The steps you’ll go through next let you know that such information may still appear across other Google products. My guess is that Nest Hub and other devices may still draw from your account history and potentially speak relevant results out loud where others can hear if they’re within earshot.

Anyway, once you’re finished, the Google account activity section will be hidden by a colorful lock image that reads “To see your full history, verify it’s you.” If you’d like to manage the contents here, just click the blue ‘Verify’ button. Luckily, this just takes you to the standard password prompt. Funny enough, if you use autofill for this, then anyone can bypass the extra protection entirely.

What do you think? Is this useless to you or will you toggle it on? I went ahead and tested it out, and I’ll just say that I can see it being useful to some users. The more options we get for data protection and privacy controls, the better. The company is truly going the extra mile to add new settings and visibility around them, and I hope to see this trend continue.