Delete Google Web History!

One week from today, March 1, Google’s much-criticized unified privacy policy will go into effect. While there is a great deal of debate over how much (or how little) the new privacy policy will affect users, it’s clear that people are concerned about the search giant’s increasingly thick folders of personal data it stores on each of us. What the policy most certainly does do, however, is makes it so the information Google has is more easily shared across its various services. As it stands today, all that data collected through searches performed while logged into your Google account has been kept separate from the troves of other data the company has in its coffers. That will all change come next Thursday. Unless, of course, you delete all of it. And here’s how you can do that in less than a minute:

• First, go to google.com/history. There, you’ll be asked to sign into your Google account.

• Second, click the “Remove all Web History” button. And that’s it! You’re done. Not only is all your search data removed from Google’s grasps, but doing this automatically pauses Web History, meaning no more information will be collected until you click the blue “Resume” button at the top of the page.

(Note: If you have more than one Google account, you’ll have to do this whole process for each of them.) (Note #2: If you have a 'gmail' address - that's a Google account!)

If you want to be less drastic, you can also go through your entire Web History (both intriguing and truly frightening), and pick out the bits and pieces you’d rather Google not know about. You can then simply hit the “Pause” button, and no more search data will be collected.