How to pause or delete your YouTube watch history

The reasons for pausing or deleting videos in your YouTube watch history are many. Perhaps you want to prevent the contamination of your timeline because a pesky nephew watched a bunch of videos and ruined your recommendations, or perhaps you don’t want the world to learn of your weakness for Taylor Swift songs. Whatever the case — we’re not here to judge — pausing or deleting your watch history is the best way of going about doing this. Here’s how.

Deleting your YouTube watch history on a smartphone

Whether you’re using an iPhone or Android device, the process is largely similar. 

1. Open the YouTube app 

2. Tap on your profile icon. This is usually found on the bottom-left of your app. 

3. Tap on the gear or ‘Settings’ icon. 

4. Tap on ‘Manage all history’. 

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5. Scroll down to view all the videos you’ve watched. Tapping the ‘x’ button on an individual video will remove it from your watch history. You can also tap on the ‘x’ button next to the ‘Today’ section to delete videos for the day. 

6. If you want to delete all your watch history, or all history for a particular range, tap on ‘Delete’ and select one of the options that emerge from the delete menu. You can also use the search bar to look for a specific video that you want to delete.

Pausing your YouTube watch history on your smartphone

1. In the same settings page, look for ‘Saving your watch history’ and tap on it. 

2. Tapping ‘Turn off’ will turn off YouTube watch history tracking till you turn it back on. 

3. You can also scroll down and disable only YouTube watch history tracking or even just search history tracking. 

4. There’s also an option to auto-delete all activity that’s older than a certain date. This can be done by tapping ‘Auto delete’ in the YouTube settings panel and selecting a time period under ‘Auto-delete activity older than….’ The minimum period is three months and the maximum is three years.

Pausing or deleting your YouTube watch history on a tablet

The process to pause or delete your YouTube watch history is identical on Android tablets and iPads, with the only difference being how you access the settings panel. On tablets, open the YouTube app and tap on the profile icon, then scroll down and tap on ‘Settings’ in the panel that pops up. You then select ‘Manage all history’ here, leading to the menu structure defined above.

Pausing or deleting your YouTube watch history on a PC or Mac

The following are the steps to pause or delete your YouTube watch history on your Windows laptop/desktop, or MacBook.  

1. Head to YouTube.com and sign in. 

2. Click on ‘History’ in the left column under the ‘You’ section. 

3. Individually delete items from your history by hitting ‘x’ next to each entry or hit ‘Clear watch history’ in the right column to delete everything. 

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4. To pause your watch history, hit the ‘Pause watch history’ option in the right column to pause logging. 

5. You can also tap on ‘Manage watch history’ in the same column, to be presented with the options you get on your smartphone or tablet.

Do note that deleting or pausing watch history only deletes or pauses watch history from your account logs. Google is likely still tracking your activities.