Quick-wipe your phone searches: For Chrome, hit the three dots at the top, and choose History > Clear browsing data. Use Safari? Open Settings, and tap Safari > Clear History and Website Data. Choose a timeframe and tap Clear History. Phew, it’s gone.
Reset your social media algorithms
Still stuck in election season on your social media feed? Or maybe you bought one bottle of perfume and now Big Tech thinks you’re launching a beauty empire. Algorithms are smart, but they don’t know when you’re ready to get back to your regularly scheduled programming, like cat videos and memes. Here’s how to reset your feed and take control of what you see.
Start with Facebook
Goodbye, annoying ads. It only takes a minute to kick out the things you no longer want to see.
🛠️ The fix: Filter your advertising topics by going to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Account Center > Ad Preferences > Customize ads.
Now, on to YouTube
Say your family is staying with you for the holidays and your niece is watching cartoons on your YouTube account all day long. Now that’s all YouTube recommends. Delete your search history to get things back to normal.
🛠️ The fix: On the YouTube app, tap You to bring up your History. Tap the cog icon > Settings > Manage All History. At the bottom, you’ll see DELETE with a blue down arrow. Tap from the dropdown menu to delete videos from today, a custom range or all time. Click X to remove items individually, if you prefer.
Going forward, turn off your viewing history any time you don’t want those vids in your algorithm. You can set your video and search histories to autodelete, too. Now your YouTube is back to how you like it, with my video podcast at the very top. You’ll love it!
TikTok tracks your habits
TikTok’s algorithm is built to keep you on the app. Every time you like, follow or comment on something, it tells the algorithm you’re interested in a video, and more videos like it will pop up on your For You page. Disliking a video or writing a nasty comment doesn’t matter, by the way; you still kept watching.
🛠️ The fix: Reset your feed. Open your Profile in the bottom right corner then press the three lines at the top right > Settings and Privacy > Content Preferences > Refresh Your For You Feed > Continue.
Fine-tune Instagram
Privacy tip: How to wipe what you searched for in your browser and on social media
If you share a computer with others in your household, keeping a surprise vacation or gift a secret can be challenging. Saved searches, in particular, can rat you out.
After all, if your web browser defaults to Expedia every time someone types in an “E,” your plans will be found out. Are you traveling soon? Tap or click here for some travel safety tips. Plus, saved searches eat up memory on your hard drive.
See exactly what Facebook knows about you - and delete it - with this tool
It’s been a good deal of time since Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed the “future is private.” But based on the company’s behavior in the past several months, its difficult to say how much it’s tried to uphold that ideal.
Facebook did release several high-profile privacy tools for users to try out. They supposedly give you more flexibility with how your data is used, but Facebook continues getting caught mishandling the information it collects. Tap or click here to see how Facebook continues to exploit user data.