Google Will Now Automatically Delete The Web History And App Activity

Previously it was a huge effort and waste of time to just clear the history of your web activity, apps activity, search logs, YouTube history, and location history.

So today Google‘s CEO Sundar Pichai announces several privacy improvements to help users better control the data they’re sharing and providing the users a sense of security towards their privacy.

Till last year, Google used to delete the data after 3 months or 18 months of the inactivity. Now, that feature will be enabled by default for new users.

Existing Google accounts won’t have this enabled by default, though the company will begin promoting the option more prevalently on those services. One can adjust the frequency in the Activity controls setting the auto-delete to never, after 3 months or after 18 months or for YouTube it is 3 years.

Further changes

The company will also be making it easier to check in on the Account controls more easily. Users will be able to simply do a search for “Google Privacy Checkup” and “Is my Google Account secure?” to see a box with the privacy and security settings. And to browse more privately, Incognito Mode will be accessible by simply long-pressing your profile picture in Google Search, Maps, and YouTube.

Data is very valuable to Google’s ad network business, so it’s nice to see the company make some compromises. Obviously, a user’s recent data is the most useful for targeted ads, but it’s still great to be able to scrub older data from the account.

In this way the Google will be comfortable to make its ads approach to the user and also secure the privacy of the user by eliminating them in future which gives a small side-benefit of storage.

That’s it. Basically this is a compromise between privacy and ad-targeting data by the company.