Removing Google Search History Information

Have you ever watched one of those crime dramas, where the investigators check through the suspects search history when trying to prove them guilty.   They’ll notice that the local priest has spent the last  three weeks googling poisons and then sweep round to his house while he’s concocting a vat of cyanide?   It’s sounds great doesn’t it, and indeed it is when everything is completely straight forward and scripted.

Yet if you looked through say a couple of years of anyone’s search history, there’s probably a high chance you could find at least suspicious or incriminating.  It’s simply the case, that we Google all sorts of things that pop into our heads, often in my case after a long day and with a large drink in my hand.   I know for a fact if you pick specific days in my search history, I’ll look very much like an undercover terrorist researching my latest target.  What’s actually happened is I’ve probably had a few too many whilst reading an article on some horrible atrocity somewhere and started aimlessly browsing the subject of terrorism.

It’s a very simple example but a white, slightly tipsy, curious  40 year old  agnostic male can look very  much like a 20 year old religious fundamentalist with a death wish if you look at their search history out of context. Remember the internet is stuffed full of our history in all sorts of places, including our search histories.

So how can we retain some our privacy?

Well using encryption is obviously a big step, without using something like Identity Cloaker you’ll always leave a complete record of everything you do online.  However what about the past? Can you imagine the sort of information a company like Facebook or Google has gathered on us over the years?  Well fortunately there is a way to rectify this too, at least with regards your Google Search History – thanks to a brand new feature they’ve introduced.

First Let’s Review All the Information That Google has About You.

First you need to start here – Google History Page

Then click the gear icon

And Select Download from the Drop Down Menu

Then you’ll be presented with this warning –

Just select create archive and you can download all your Google Search history.  Obviously as the warning highlights you should be very careful where you download this and where you store it!   You can then browse everything that you have searched for online using Google – it can be quite interesting!

In the next post, I’ll show you how to remove all this history from Google’s servers. Please check out this other post on anonymous surfing though, which has more information. Note this not the same as simply removing the history from your local browser.