Automatically Deleting Your Google History Data

How to automatically delete your Google account history

Google famously keeps very meticulous records of all your online activity. If you have a Google account (such as Gmail or a business Google account) and stay logged into that account then Google is definitely tracking what you’re doing.

There are undoubtedly some legitimate uses of this data, but there’s no reason that it needs to be stored for any significant period of time. It turns out that Google does give you the option to have your data automatically deleted form your account after a chosen period of time.

What Information Does Google Allow You to Auto-Delete?

Google allows you to delete 3 broad categories of your historical data: Web & App History, Location History, and YouTube History. Once you get into the Google Account settings and get to this area you can click on the individual data categories to see examples of the data that you’ll automatically delete.

The most obvious example is your actual Google search history. There’s no reason for Google to (or for you to allow Google to) keep information on what you searched for 3+ years ago. That’s highly unlikely to provide any value to you now or in the future.

How to Automatically Delete Your Google Account History

It’s a rather simple process. Surprisingly simple, actually.

A very important note here. If you use multiple Google accounts, like me, then you’ll need to go through this process for each of your accounts. 

First, sign into the Google Account that you want to delete the history for.

Then, go to your Google Account settings. If you’re in Gmail, click your profile pic in the top-right corner and then select “Manage Your Google Account”.

Then click on Data and Personalization.

Click on Data and Personalization in your Google Account

In the Data and Personalization screen you’ll see the area where you can choose your data retention settings.

Click on each of the 3 sections and you’ll see a screen similar to this:

This is where you can delete your past history, but most importantly, set it to automatically delete. Click on the Auto-delete link to choose the settings you want to use.

Feel free to choose whatever makes sense for you and your particular situation. Personally, I would recommend deleting anything older than 3 months for most people. If you’re a very heavy user then maybe you would want to stretch that to 18 months. I wouldn’t go longer than that.

It’s the same process for deleting the YouTube and Location history.

That’s it! You now have a little bit more privacy than you did before.

How To Use Ghost Path VPN to Watch Out of Market Sports

Watching out of market sports is one of the best use cases for a VPN service. Today’s tutorial is a quick guide to using Ghost Path to watch your favorite sports teams even though you’re not in their local viewing market.

The Process

Typically, when you want to watch your team’s games you’ll want to connect to a VPN server in their local market. This goes for all major sports in the US, and likely elsewhere in the world. Ghost Path has great coverage across the world, but especially in the US. You should be able to find a server very close to the market you’re interested in.

Decide which servers you want to use

If you’re using the Ghost Path client then you can choose servers directly in the client. If you’re using a third-party app like OpenVPN, Viscosity, or Tunnelblick, then you’ll want to download ready-to-use configuration files from our VPN servers page.

Connect and Test

Once you’ve got the servers determined and configured in your VPN client, you’ll want to connect to those servers and verify that you are being seen in that location. An easy way to test is to check your IP address and see if you show as being in the location you’re targeting. If you are where you want to be, then you should be good to go.

If not, it could be that the location provider doesn’t have updated records of our IP address and it’s datacenter location. If we have multiple VPN servers in that city (which is fairly common) then you’ll want to try those.

Pro-tip: If you can’t get the VPN connection to work to your team’s home market, then try the opponent’s home market. Many times a broadcast will be shown in both markets. 

Here’s a short tutorial using Viscosity to connect to a few different cities.

 

Using Ghost Path with Tunnelblick

Video tutorial for configuring Tunnelblick

Tunnelblick is a popular free OpenVPN client for Mac. It’s been around a long time, is still being updated, and is a breeze to use. This post has a video tutorial that walks you through the process of setting up Tunnelblick so that you can quickly and easily access Ghost Path’s VPN servers.

How to install and configure Tunnelblick to work with Ghost Path servers

Here’s the full list of Ghost Path VPN servers. You can click the OpenVPN link for any of those servers to download a pre-config’d OpenVPN file to easily import into Tunnelblick.