Don’t Delete your Search History

We all know the feeling; you pass your Mom your phone to show her something on the internet and she has it for an incredibly long time. You see her tapping away at the screen and the colour begins to drain from your face. “Please don’t look at my search history” you silently beg her.

I’m a writer, when I am not stationed at RLR HQ, I write fiction. I have Googled some pretty terrifying things in my time, all in the name of a good story, of course. There are definitely things that my parents do not need to see.

For example, in my second book a sexual predator had his favourite part removed by a female vigilante, I Googled how long it’d take for him to bleed out. Try explaining that one to your parents.

These struggles may soon be a thing of the past, in a bid for users to have greater control over their data, Google is going to offer an automatic deletion of user’s search history! This is absolutely fantastic for those of us who indulge in some of the more interesting things on the internet.

The settings will have the option of deleting this data automatically after 3 months or after 18 months depending on the user’s preferences.

The tech giant has received its fair share of criticism for the huge amount of data it collects, they have even been accused of tracking user’s locations after they had switched off their location history.

If you are a part of our loyal readership (shout out to you guys!) then you may remember our blog from a couple of weeks ago about Amazon’s Alexa. Google has admitted that they also listen to some voice recordings from their home assistant and mobile apps. Do they not read our blogs!?

But perhaps the tech giant is attempting to redeem itself here. Anything that protects the people that use it earns a gold-star from us!

Teenage boys around the world will be relieved – though we know that a large percentage delete their browser history daily anyway! We can’t begin to imagine why. Or perhaps we would rather not dwell on it for too long!

Google will not be allowing you to delete your YouTube watch history or the history on your home assistant, so please keep that in mind when making requests and watching content.