I was glad to see that my Chromecast device arrived today. After waiting a few weeks for them to be in stock, mine has finally arrived. I’ll go into the details of what’s included in the package and how to set it up in another post, but first I want to share some information that it took me a while to figure out to get it up and running. After I had set up my device and the app on my phone, I wanted to set it up in Chrome so that I could cast from my computer, as well. I went to the Chrome Web Store to look for the Chromecast app, but when I typed Chromecast in the search bar, there were no results found. I searched through Google help and kept getting sent to the setup page, which I didn’t need because I had already set up the device with my phone.
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.