How-To

Delete the Screenshots Google Keeps of Your Android Searches

By Brian Burgess

Updated December 15, 2017

Google has added a new feature to your Android device that saves the screenshots of your searches. Here is how to stop it.

It’s no secret that Google keeps information about your browsing history in order to serve up “relevant” advertising to you. However, the “do no evil” tech giant is getting bolder with its data collection. This includes the capturing of screenshots of your search history, which is rather creepy if you ask me. Oh, and it’s enabled by default.

The screenshots are saved on your local device. The point of this new app feature is to allow users to go back and look up previous search history. Not only that, but it appears to save all of the websites you’ve visited over the past seven days.

How to Stop Google Android from keeping Screenshots of Your Search History

Obviously, if you are concerned about your mobile privacy you’ll want to delete current screenshots saved on your device. To do that, open the Google Assistant app and tap the menu button and then “Recent” from the top of the list. From here you’ll see a list of recent searches from the past seven days that scrolls horizontally. If you want to manually delete a particular group or individual screen, swipe up to get rid of them.

Open the Google app and select Recent to see a list of screenshots of your searches from the past seven days.

If you want to disable the collection of shots completely head to Settings > Accounts & privacy and toggle “Enable Recent” to the off position. That will delete all of the screenshots currently saved on your device, too.

Currently, it’s not apparent if that the company is syncing your screenshots between accounts or devices (yet anyway). Also, it’s not clear if the search history screenshot collecting is going on with iOS, yet, either. If you don’t see the screenshot history on your device yet, it probably hasn’t been rolled out to you yet, but you be sure it will come eventually.

Still, if you are worried about privacy while using your Android phone or tablet, at least it allows a way to delete these shots or disable collection of them altogether.

What do you think about Google keeping full screenshots of your search history on your Android devices? Do you find this to be a helpful feature or just creepy instead? Join the discussion in the comments. Would love to hear from you!