Only 3 steps to delete your Google History.
I’d strongly urge everyone to take 5 minutes to do this before next week. After March 1 you’re S.O.L.
To quote Ben Franklin, An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Interesting. I’ve never once “logged” into Google or given them a username. I never went to Google+ or Gmail. Would the same information/results apply, or is it only people who have gone through those registry steps?
It says in the linked article that Google will use your IP address to determine what content you’ve searched for, looked at, etc. You do not need to be logged into Google services.
If you have a GMail account then its tied to a Google Account.
Log into Gmail and open a tab with Google. You should see your user name in the upper right corner.
Youtube is also tied into this login.
That’s one reason people are concerned about the new privacy policy. three accounts all creating history for Google to track.
I have a long-standing Google account, but I almost never sign in to it. For normal searching, it was never necessary. I do not even recall the username and password (no doubt I have a record of them somewhere.)
However, I have noticed that, recently, the link to change your search settings has disappeared from the Google home page. Presumably you have to be signed in to access it. This means that if you do want to something like searching for porn (which would require safe search, on by default, to be turned off) you will have to be signed in, so that Google can track you!
Don’t be evil, my ass!! :mad:
When I follow the instructions, at Step 3, my options are merely “no thanks” and “turn web history on.”
Does that mean I’m already safe?
Mine was the same. I turned it on, then removed history. I never use my gmail or google search anymore.
Okay, I did that, but now I don’t see an option to turn it off.
This is pretty cool! 8901 Total Google searches
I’m not overly worried about privacy…anything I’m looking for, so are a thousand others. Plus I’m boring.
What bad things will happen to me if I don’t do this?
I wandered in here to ask the same thing. Privacy on the internet is laughable anyway. What will happen to me if some mysterious entity finds out that I’m looking up [del]female porn stars[/del] [del]male porn stars[/del] fluffy kittens?
They will try to sell you [del]porn[/del] cat food.
“Slut Kitten Nibbles”
Same. I really don’t care that much. If it brings targeted advertising, I prefer that to random shit I’ll never need. If they start abusing my good will towards them for this, then they can go, but until then I expect it to be invisible and seamless.
I see an option to “pause” it, so I did that. There was also no history to be found on mine, anyway. I have a second account for work, so signed into that one and I guess since it’s a corporate account with an administrator, history doesn’t come into play unless the admin turns it on for individual accounts. Safe there, I guess, unless the admin decides to keep track of us or something and turns it on.
You’ve got to love how Google goes nuts telling you that they are changing their policy, but attempts to hide completely what the changes mean. They claim they’re just consolidating their policies. I know I looked and looked for what was actually different, and I couldn’t find it. It’s not that hard to say “You know that information we collect about you that we said we’d never sell? Yeah, we’re going to sell that now, not because we are hurting for money or anything, but how dare Facebook make money off of this when we don’t. Trying to make people sign up for Google+ wasn’t working, so we had to do this.”
Okay, so maybe they can’t be that frank. But I still shouldn’t have had to hear about the actual effect of the policy changes from other sources. Ones that severely overhype it to the point that I’m still not sure Google is admitting to selling anything.
Also, am I the only one who already had this service turned off anyways? It’s not as if Google wasn’t using this stuff in searches and advertising before. Even with the previous policy, I didn’t trust Google not to be selling information on some sort of black market.
If it is turned off, has it recorded any history? I don’t want to turn it on and then be unable to turn it off again if I am creating an issue.
Yep. I’m in this bucket too and am curious.
Mine was turned off, I turned it on and it says my search history is empty (despite using google quite a bit while logged in) so I’m pretty sure you’re safe. There’s no option to turn it back off as far as I can see, however you can ‘pause’ it - I’m not sure if that’s the same thing or not.
FWIW I just checked out of curiosity (after seeing someone mention 8000+ google searches) rather then actually caring - I’m also not really sure exactly what the problem is and what terrible things will happen if the history is not deleted.
Edit: campp - if you don’t log into google, I believe they track it by IP address and that information can’t be deleted (unless you log into an account) but I’m not 100% sure about that.
I had that option. I turned it on, then cleared it.
When you clear it, it says that it’s now “paused”.
So, it seems to me that turning it on, clearing it, and leaving it paused is clearly “no history, and there’s not gonna be any”. While just leaving it in limbo was ambiguous.