YouTube will now let you auto-delete your video search and watch history

Hide your shame.
YouTube will now let you auto-delete your video search and watch history
YouTube is rolling out a feature that allows user to auto-delete their video watch and search history. Credit: Florian Gaertner/Getty Images

Your browsing experience on YouTube just became a little more private.

Google announced it is now rolling out an auto-delete feature for YouTube. This will allow users to keep their video search and watch history on the platform for a predetermined amount of time before the data is automatically wiped.

YouTube’s options allow users to set their account to keep history data for 3 months, 18 months, or until they choose to manually delete it.


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Users do have the ability to turn off history data completely, but some users would like this information to be temporarily stored so that they could easily revisit recently watched videos and searches.

Google launched a similar auto-delete feature for location history attached to users’ Google account in May.

The update came along with a slew of other new privacy-oriented feature announcements across Google’s suite of platforms and products on Wednesday. Also rolling out this month, the long-awaited Incognito mode on Google Maps for Android.

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