Remember that night you stayed up late watching every Crazy Town video you could find? Or when you scoured the internet for effective eye stye remedies? Google remembers those moments, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s how to scrub Google’s brain and make it forget you did any of that.
Google collects information when you use its tools like search and YouTube, and saves that to your personal profile so it can feed you targeted ads later on. But with the company’s new My Activity tool, you can knock that info into oblivion.
Here’s how:
1. Go to myactivity.google.com, and be prepared to sign into your account again for security purposes. You can search through your data or filter your activity by date or product (YouTube, Search, Ads, Shopping, etc). Only you can see this information.
2. Find the record you want to delete, and open the menu for that item by clicking on the three dots on the right end.
3. Select “delete” — and it’s gone.
If you want to delete items in bulk, choose “Delete activity by” in the right three-dot menu, and select a date range to erase. If you want everything wiped clean, you can choose “All Time” and get rid of it all.
There’s also the option to pause Google’s data collection if all of this is making you a bit unsettled: go to http://ift.tt/29w65Qv, where you can opt out of having Google save information about your searches, location history, and video searches, among other things. Now no one will know about your secret Crazy Town obsession besides you and your poor cat.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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