Browsers, Google Chrome, Privacy and You

We've built Chrome not only to be faster, but also to put you in control of your private information, while helping protect the information that you share when you're online.

Managing your privacy in Chrome

1. Incognito mode

When you don't want your website visits or downloads to be recorded in your browsing and download histories, you can browse in Incognito mode. In addition, any cookies created while in Incognito mode are deleted after you close the Incognito window.

When you're browsing in Incognito mode, you'll see the Incognito icon  in the corner.

Incognito mode is particularly handy, since it's an easy way to browse the web in a private way without needing to change your privacy settings back and forth between browsing sessions. For example, you can have one normal session, as well as one incognito session, in separate windows at the same time.

2. Privacy preferences

You can control all your privacy preferences for Chrome from the Options dialogue, under the Privacy section, located at the top of the Under the Hood tab.

Learn more about managing your privacy preferences for:

• Suggestions in the Omnibox
• Phishing and malware protection
• Suggestions for navigation errors
• Usage statistics and crash reports

3. Clearing your browsing data

With Chrome, you can clear your browsing data at any time, so that this information is not stored in your browser. You have full control over the types of browsing data that you'd like to erase from your browser, including browsing and download histories, cookies, saved passwords and saved form data. Learn more

4. Controlling privacy preferences for cookies, images, JavaScript and plug-ins

Under Chrome's content settings, you can control your privacy preferences for cookies, images, JavaScript and plug-ins on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to automatically allow cookies only for a specified list of sites that you trust and then manually manage cookie blocking and setting for all other sites. Learn more

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5. Opting out of ad personalisation

Advertisers use cookies to personalise your ads and improve your experience, so that you see ads that interest you. Advertising companies that are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and other self-regulatory effortsallow you to opt out of this personalisation. In Chrome, you can maintain your opt-out status for the browser permanently, even when you clear all cookies by installing the “Keep My Opt-Outs” Chrome extension.

6. Understanding other data sent by the browser

We've taken great care to make sure that Chrome is designed with your privacy in mind. It only communicates with Google services where absolutely necessary to deliver features and functionality. You can disable features that require this kind of communication in Chrome's options, so that you are in control of what is sent to Google when you use Chrome.

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Google’s new Privacy Policy on Google world

Our updated Privacy Policy takes effect today, March 1. As you use our products one thing will be clear: it’s the same Google experience that you’re used to, with the same controls. 

And because we’re making these changes, over time we’ll be able to improve our products in ways that help our users get the most from the web.

While we’ve undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in our history to explain the coming changes, we know there has been a fair amount of chatter and confusion. 

Here are a few important points to bear in mind:

Our Privacy Policy is now much easier to understand.

We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Our Privacy Policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.

If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.

So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties. 

Our privacy controls aren’t changing.

The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.

If you don’t think information sharing will improve your experience, you can use ourprivacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history and YouTube history,control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the web “incognito” using Chrome. You can use services like Search, Maps and YouTube if you are not signed in. You can even separate your information into different accounts, since we don’t combine personal information across them. And we’re committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can.

We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us. We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better. 

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