You’ve likely heard that Google is instituting a new privacy policy on March 1(today). Under the policy, Google will create one massive hub of your personal web proclivities, culled from across more than 60 products that it owns. From your activities on an Android phone to the videos you watch on YouTube, all of the separate bins of data the company has collected on you will be combined into one massive user profile.
- Step 1: Pull up your Google web history (click on this link to proceed)
- Step 2: Hit the pause button to stop your data from being collected moving forward
- Step 3: Select the “Remove All Web History” button to do exactly that
Policy Highlights from different resources
- The new terms will allow Google to regroup data from several different services that were previously separate under a single comprehensive profile without user consent, giving it a more integrated view of its users, an advantage enjoyed by Apple and Facebook.
- The new policy makes it easier for Google to combine the data of one person using different services such as the search engine, YouTube or Gmail if he is logged into his Google account
- Google will soon have a massive, all-inclusive database of your most private information, from your political leanings to your searches for prescription drugs. And there’s nothing you can do about it, short of giving up your Google habit.
What Google is saying
The change is in the best interest of users — allowing the company to better tailor content your specific interests
For deleting you tube history
On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Earlier this week, we showed you how to delete your Google Web History in order to prevent Google from combining your Web History data with the data it has about you on its other products to provide you with personalized ads or suggestions across all of its products. You may also wish to delete your YouTube Viewing and Search History, which can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, and health concerns.
Note that disabling Viewing and Search History in your YouTube account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be soughtby law enforcement.
With Viewing and Search History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented. An individual concerned about privacy may also want to set up a secondary Google account for browsing and sharing YouTube videos. She could then download all of her existing YouTube videos to her computer, delete them from her primary Google profile, and then use a separate browser to upload them to a new secondary Google account. If you want to do more to reduce the records Google keeps, the advice in EFF’s Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy white paper remains relevant.
The following steps will delete your viewing and search history on YouTube. If you have multiple YouTube accounts, you will have to complete these steps for each account.
1. Log in to your Google account.
2. Go to https://www.youtube.com
3. Click on your icon.
4. Click “Video Manager”
5. Click “History”
6. Click “Clear all viewing history.”
7. Click “Pause viewing history.”
8. Click “Search History.” and 9. Click “Clear all search history.”
10. Click “Pause search history.”
If you have multiple YouTube accounts, you will have to complete these steps for each account.
