The coming changes to Google’s privacy settings were announced a while ago, but they’ll be taking effect tomorrow, so it’s worth a reminder. The new settings will allow Google to share your data between apps, something it never did before. This means that your web-browsing history may start influencing the ads you see in Gmail, or that the items on your Calendar might start influncing the ads you see on Google Maps. There’s nothing you can really do to stop this, but you can, however, limit the information shared if you remove your Google web history today, before it starts getting shared around tomorrow.
Fortunately, removing your Google web history couldn’t be easier. Here’s how you do it:
- Log into your Google Account.
- Navigate to google.com/history
- Click Remove all web history
Easy as that. Now you won’t have to worry about your web history leaking into your other apps. As an added bonus, removing your web history automatically pauses history tracking, keeping the slate clean until the new policy rolls into effect tomorrow, and beyond. Google will still be able to scrape together information from your other apps and share those around among them, is one of the largest pockets you have access to, and by far the easiest to get rid of, so you might as well.
If you’re going to do, I suggest you do it now. Like, right now. It’s ridiculously easy to do, and just as easy to forget.
- More on what this new policy actually is
- At least Google seems to follow its own rules
- Google is offering $1 million in prizes to Chrome hackers
