How to Close Your Google+ Account Without Affecting Other Google Services

In the news, we read all the time how some celebrity got tired of the flaming or harassment on Twitter and decided to close down their Twitter accounts to avoid any further headache. Actually it is very easy to close down your accounts for social networks like Facebook or Twitter because they offer just one service. But when it comes to Google’s social networking platform Google+, people get confused about how they can close their Google+ accounts and whether this action would close other services offered by Google for example Gmail,  Youtube and others?

Google offers an easy way to close down any service belonging to your Google account without affecting any other services for your Google account. Here is how you can close down your Google+ account safely without losing anything else belonging to your Google account:

  1. Visit https://myaccount.google.com/preferences#deleteservices in a web browser. You will be asked to enter your Google account credentials as you are making changes to your Google account settings.
  2. Carefully select Delete products from the list of options. Be careful and do not click on anything else.Closing Google Plus Account
  3. Optionally, download your Google+ account data using the option shown on your screen.
  4. You will be shown a list of services associated with your Google account. Click on the small bin icon next to the Google+ service to stop using it. Be careful and do not click on the bin icon for any other service.Closing Google Plus Account

When you delete a product or service from your Google account, all the data associated with that service will be lost. So it is a good idea to download your Google account data before deleting a service. We have already published a how-to article about downloading data from your Google account using Takeout. During the downloading of your Google+ related data, it will download all of your +1 likes, Google+ circles, pages, and the stream.