Though Google offers different services and products, their primary income comes from advertisements. To serve personalized ads, Google tracks user activities through various ways. If you are logged into your Google account, then all browsing history is saved in your account. Google uses the stored details to tailor the ads shown in search pages and other services. Good thing is that you can delete all previously stored history and disable the tracking to protect your privacy.
Disable History in Google Account
- Go to Google account page and login with your account. If you are already logged, then the page will take you to the dashboard.
- Navigate “Data & privacy” section from the left sidebar.
- Scroll down on the right pane and find “History settings” section.
- Google stores your historical data under three sections – Web & App Activity, Location History and YouTube History. You can enable or disable each option as per your preference.
- You can also click on the “My Activity” button showing below the three options to view and manage all your stored browsing history.
Managing My Activities – Searching and Deleting Previous History
Click on “My Activity” button to go to “My Google Activity” page. You will be surprised to see all your historical browsing, searching, watched YouTube pages showing as a list date wise. Remember, the activities include the latest AI search with Google Bard and Google Search Generative Experience.
Simply click the X icon showing against an item to remove it from your history. You can also delete all history for a day by clicking on the X icon showing against it (for example – yesterday). Confirm your action by clicking the “Delete” link in the pop-up.
If you want to delete a particular page, it is difficult to scroll through and find it from the history. What you can do is to type the URL or keyword in the search box and press enter.
This will show the complete list of webpages from your search history. Click the three dots showing in the search box on the results page and select “Delete Results” to delete all historical items that contains the searched query. Alternatively, you can also delete an individual item or all items on a particular date.
Click on “Filter by dates & products” option to open the complete list of Google products for which history is stored. Select the products or choose date range and click “Apply” button to filter the results.
For example, you can filter based on YouTube or Video Search products and delete them same way as explained above. Finally, you can also delete the history based on any time or date range. For that click “Delete” button on “My Activity” page and select the time range to filter and delete the activities.
Disable History for Web & App Activities
The above action will only delete your previous history. To disable storing your data in Google account, click on “Web & App Activity” option and go to “Activity Controls” page. You have two options here:
Turn Off History and Delete Previous History
Click the “Turn off” button and select “Turn off” option. If you want to delete the history, then select “Turn off and delete activity” option.
Select “Turn off and delete activity” option to start the three steps process. On first step, you will see a notification and click “Next” to proceed further.
The second step will allow you to select the products. Make sure all the items are selected and click “Next” button.
The final step will show your browsed pages from history and click on “Delete” to confirm you action.
You will see a confirmation message showing “Deletion complete” and click “Got it” button to go back to “Activity Controls” page where you should see the “Web & App Activity” is showing as “Turned off” with the current date.
Enable Auto Deletion of History After Set Time
Instead of disabling the history, you can also turn on auto delete option. Click “Choose an auto-delete option” showing below “Auto-delete” heading. On the pop-up, select your duration from the dropdown. You only have three options – 3, 18 or 36 months and Google will automatically delete “Web & App Activity” history after the selected duration.
When you click on the “Next” button, Google will show the historical items those are older than the selected time. Click “Confirm” to delete those items from your history.
Finally, you will see a confirmation on auto deletion is enabled on your account. Click “Got it” button to go back to “Activity Controls” page.
Disable Location Tracking
When you are in “Activity Controls” page, scroll down to bottom and click on “See all activity controls” link.
You can follow similar steps like “Web & App Activity” section to turn off location tracking or setup auto-delete option.
Disable YouTube History
Scroll down to “YouTube History” section on “Activity Controls” page. From here, you can either turn off the setting or enable auto-deletion after set period.
Disable Personalized Ads
“Personalized Ads” is the last item on the “Activity Controls” page which has two sections – My ad Center and Partner ad settings.
My Ad Center
Click this option and you will be surprised how Google created a customized ad center for your account. You can completely disable personalized ads or it is also possible to delete topics, brands and recent ads from this section.
Simply click the “On” button and confirm your action by clicking “Turn off” option.
You will see a success message showing personalized ads are turned off in your account.
Disable Partner Ad Settings
After disabling “My Ad Center”, go to “Partner ad settings” section. Here, you can disable getting ads from partner sites and saving data from apps/sites (under related settings).
Final Words
Finally, you should see the “My Google Activity” page shows all the options are turned off with no historical activity.
Unfortunately, many people will not have time to go through all these settings to disable and delete history stored in Google account. When you have time, follow the above steps on your mobile or desktop and clean up your browsing history from Google.
