Thanks to Google’s big Google+ push a few years ago, many YouTube accounts are linked to their owner’s real name. Type your name into Google and one of the first results might be your YouTube account, complete with a feed showing all the videos you’ve watched and channels you’ve subscribed to over the past few years.
Luckily, you can still control what the rest of the world sees by properly configuring the level of privacy in your YouTube account settings.
RELATED: How to Disable Annotations on YouTube Videos.
You can add or delete any interests in this section if you want to specifically customize which ads you see. Sometimes the algorithm that detects the dates for your interests can falter and miss badly (I don’t think I’ve searched for makeup or beauty products in the past few months), and if that happens, just uncheck the box next to it the topic to prevent it from appearing again.
However, if absolute privacy is of the utmost importance, you can disable the setting entirely by toggling the toggle highlighted below:
How to improve your YouTube privacy settings
As mentioned above, YouTube collects an enormous amount of personal data about you in order to create targeted ads that make them money. However, the platform offers its users the ability to opt out of some intrusive policies and make changes to their profiles to improve their overall privacy.
But where to start? Below are our recommendations for improving your YouTube privacy settings and profile setup.
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Take control of your YouTube watch and search history
To improve your privacy on the YouTube app, the first step is to disable YouTube’s ability to save your watch and search history.
Every time you watch a video, it’s added to your watch history, even just for a moment. This is part of the data YouTube uses to create your profile. Meanwhile, your search history is the record of the searches you make on YouTube itself. (This is separate from any searches you do in the Google search engine or Chrome address bar.)
How to turn off YouTube watch and search history
To opt-out of logging your search and watch history on the YouTube app, follow these steps:
Before doing so, understand that you will no longer have access to your History section.
There are two other ways to take control of your YouTube search and watch history. It does this by using Auto Delete and manually deleting specific videos from your watch history.
How to set your YouTube search and watch history to delete automatically
Follow the steps below to set your search and watch history to automatically delete after a specified period of time.
Click History in the left menu.
