That may a slight exaggeration because it only goes back 5 years or so and it only records when your computer is logged into any Google account like Gmail, Facebook or Google+ but that still encompasses a huge number of people and searches.
The really scary thing is that many people’s computers or other devices are logged into their Google account automatically and anyone that has access to them can just pull up a simple web page that shows you all searches by date and time, physical locations visited, voice searches, Youtube searches and videos watched.
I am not paranoid in general and I am single so I can’t get in trouble for much of anything but I was still embarrassed and appalled by some of the things I searched for even a few years ago (come on, Dancing Queen videos?). Some of them would require a good explanation even though I have them like doing research for weird threads on this board.
The Ashley Madison hack affected a lot of people but I imagine this one would affect a whole lot more if more people knew about it. Luckily, there is a way to delete your entire search history but they don’t make it obvious.
If you are curious to take a look at your own, the address is just simply history.google.com
However, I am not reimbursing you for divorce expenses or reform school if you share a computer with loved ones and find things you may not want to know. Review it at your own risk.
Oh, it is still there somewhere but at least it would take a warrant and some reasonable difficulty to get it. Google never claimed that they fully delete it from their servers and I am sure they don’t even if you delete it from the tool itself. However, my home computer is also my entertainment center that is always logged into my Google account by default and I would rather be assured that someone can’t just hop on my couch and find out everything I was thinking about by date and time in the last 5 years.
I noticed some of my daughters’ searches when I wasn’t around. Shopping and unboxing videos and craftmaking videos? I am sure they thought I would never find out but it was right there so I now we have to have THE TALK.
I didn’t notice all of the Pause settings like you mentioned. I activated those as well just now after I deleted the history. That is a good tip. It isn’t like I am running a criminal enterprise; I just don’t want someone to have access to everything I look up broken down conveniently by date and time. Sometimes you just wonder what black and white midget porn looked like even if you aren’t that interested in it normally.
Yes - look for the 3 vertical dots on the menu in the top right-hand side. Select ‘Delete Options’ –> Advanced –> Select Date –> All Time –> Delete. That applies to search history only. You have to do the same thing for locations, Youtube etc. I get the impression they don’t people to do that but I suffered no ill effects from deleting everything and putting future reporting on Pause under the Settings menu after that.
Correction: I made a typo in my OP for some brain-dead reason. Logging into Facebook will not record your Google searches but Gmail, Google+ and several other Google services will. That still captures a vast amount of data for a large percentage of web users. Facebook has their own privacy concerns but this one doesn’t include Facebook itself because it is a separate company. You will have to read about Facebook privacy settings separately to tone those way down as well.
Now, if Google ever buys Facebook, we might quickly reach a anti-privacy singularity very quickly.
I think I opted out of the search history thing already. Seeing what locations I logged in from is kind of neat, though.
One unusual thing: there must have been a couple of days in October and February of 2014 when my wife was watching stuff on YouTube using a browser on which I was logged in, because Google claims I was looking at Chinese soap operas and cat videos on those days.
Me too, all of this. My histories are all blank, with the exception of YouTube, for which there’s a whole bunch of stuff I definitely watched, peppered with random videos I don’t remember ever seeing (mostly cat videos). Perhaps it’s click-bait stuff from like Facebook that I erroneously clicked on and closed immediately without watching?
When I go to history.google.com, it tells me to sign in. Since I don’t have a Google account and YouTube wouldn’t accept my old log-in name from before Google liberated YouTube, I won’t and can’t. So Google can’t take my lunch money to keep it from spilling the beans.
