Gmail is a bit like a hub service. Many of us therefore use it to centralize our entire digital life. A role that suits him perfectly, but which is not without risk.
And for a fairly simple reason. If a malicious person manages to take control of our box, then they will also have access to all our other accounts. With all the dangers that this entails.
Fortunately, the Google teams have planned the blow and they have thus deployed a dashboard allowing you to disconnect your Gmail account remotely and to ensure that it is not configured on a device that does not belong to us.
How to access the list of devices on which our Gmail account is configured?
The first thing to do will of course be to check if a malicious person has managed to gain access to our Gmail account.
The good news is, you won't have to search far to find the associated dashboard. Google has made it as accessible as possible.
Just follow these steps:
- Open Gmail in your browser (or another Google service);
- Click on your avatar at the top right;
- Click on “Manage your Google account”;
- Google opens a new tab;
- Click on the “Security” menu on the left;
- Scroll down the page on the right to the “Your devices” insert;
- Click on the “manage devices” link;
- Google will display a list of all devices associated with the account;
Here, you will therefore find, for example, the computers on which you have configured your Google account, or even your phones, your tablets, your Android boxes and finally all the devices that use your account in one way or another.
If you feel a little lost, don't panic, each device is presented in a map with a visual representing it, its name and, above all, its location.
If you live in France, do not travel much and see for example appear in the list of devices used in India, Germany or even Latin America, then this is a bad sign.
The good news is that you can also disconnect the devices of your choice in a few clicks.
How to remotely disconnect a device?
And it gets better, because you won't even have to change pages or go to another site to do so. Everything will indeed happen directly from this page.
If you spot a suspicious device, just click on the button representing three small dots stacked on top of each other, in the associated map. A menu will then appear. You will simply have to click on “disconnect” and validate the choice so that your Google account is deleted from the device and the latter can no longer access it.
But be careful, because you will not have to limit yourself to this one action.
Other security measures to put in place
If someone with bad intentions has managed to set up your Gmail account on a device that does not belong to you, then they may have been able to guess or get your password.
The first action to take will therefore be to immediately change your password, choosing a sequence that is difficult to find. And if you don't want to have to remember it, then you can also rely on password managers like Dashlane, LastPass or even the tools built into Chrome and macOS.
But you should not limit yourself to this one measure. It is also advisable to activate the two-step identification to avoid any unpleasant surprises. If you do not know how to do this, we refer you to this file .