Google Privacy Policy Taking Effect: How To Clear Your History

Google Privacy Policy: What You Need To Know for March 1

Google's new privacy policy takes effect on March 1, 2012. What this means: all of your user info and usage history will be shared across each product and service, and will be stored centrally. Invasive? Yup. Legal? Depends on who you ask.

France has already said that Google's new privacy policy violates French law, and the policy will likely not pass muster with the EU Directive on Data Protection. It also loooks like Google was less than honest when it said that European officials were pre-briefed on the upcoming changes.

While you've all seen the little banner atop your Gmail telling you about the upcoming changes, most of you haven't actually read the new Google privacy policy. You cannot opt out of the privacy policy: you either have to agree to it or stop using Google's personalized services.

• Google's New Privacy Policy: Read It
  

Remember: Gmail, Youtube, and Google Docs are not the products. You are the product: your surfing and web-usage habits are gold to Google, which they trade to advertisers for cold, hard cash.

This sort of move relies on an uninformed public: remember, far too many web-users don't know that browsers other than IE6 exist, and type into their search engine as though they're talking to a person. (As an aside, it's 2012: not knowing how the web works is no longer okay.)

There are some steps you can take, though, to keep Google from breathing down your neck and targeting you with creepy ads. You can keep yourself logged out of Gmail, Maps, Docs, and the like when not actively using them.

You can also nuke the already-gathered data associated with your account.

Photos

Why is Popeye on Google?

see larger image

uploaded by Blaine Metzgar

How to Clear your Google History

There is a video below which shows how to clear your Google browsing history, which we'll also explain here. It's very easy:

1. Sign in to your Google account and visit google.com/history.
2. Click "Remove All Web History", then click "OK".
3. If for whatever reason you want to re-enable Google's web-history logging, you can do so on the same page.
4. Corporate users: if your email service is managed by Google, then this page won't activate for you. Just make sure that you follow the steps above for your personal Gmail or Google services account if you've linked your private and work emails.

Android users: in case you were wondering, it's actually possible to use an Android smartphone without a Gmail account, but the user experience would be horrible. Nothing would sync, you'd have to manage all of your contacts by hand, and none of the third-party apps (i.e. the only ones you could use) would communicate with each other properly.  Just as an iPhone requires an iTunes account, an Android phone requires a Gmail account.

(Yes there are homebrew-firmware options to mitigate this, but are you really going to build your own branch of Android? I, for one, won't.)

There are advantages to using the Google ecosystem, but it's a matter of limiting your exposure, both in terms of targeted-ad creepiness and consolidated-data risk.