I’m sure you’ve already heard, but the Android Market has been rebranded as Google Play. Google Play is the reincarnation of the Android Market, which has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few months, as first music and then books and movies have been added. My only hesitation when the Market became Google Play on my phone was having to agree to the privacy policy once again, which, of course, is the new comprehensive Google privacy policy covering all properties and all accounts. If you think about it, shouldn’t it be called the Google sharing policy instead of privacy policy, since you are basically giving Google permission to share your information across every relationship that you have with them?
Delete Your Google Search History Before It Becomes a Permanent Record
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released clear instructions and a compelling argument for deleting your Google search history before the new, comprehensive Google Privacy Policy goes into effect on March 1, 2012. The concern with the new, unified privacy policy is that your web search history will be combined with your data on YouTube, Google Plus, Gmail, Google Docs and all other Google properties, as well as saving it as a permanent history. Removing your search history won’t stop Google from using your data for internal purposes, but it will keep different Google properties from using your search history for marketing and customization purposes.
The instructions are simple. When logged in to your Google account, go to http://www.google.com/history and click the “remove all history” button, confirming it on the next page. That’s it. That will remove your search history and keep your history from being recorded in the future. It is also important that you do this for all of your Google accounts and for some of us, that might quite a task.