Your watch history on YouTube stores a list of all videos that you’ve watched. Your watch history is used to keep track of which videos you have watched, giving you a helpful indicator as to if you’ve previously watched a video. This data is also used to help inform the videos that YouTube suggests to you.
The YouTube service uses the videos you watch to identify a list of interests, from general topics to channels. By using the list of specific videos that you’ve watched it can further target recommendations to the specific types of content you watch and exclude videos you’ve already seen. If you don’t want YouTube to monitor the videos that you’re watching, you can disable the watch history feature. It will, however, make YouTube more likely to suggest videos that you’ve already seen.
To change your watch history settings in YouTube on Android, you need to configure the in-app settings. To do so, you first need to tap on your profile picture icon in the top-right corner of the app.
To open the in-app settings themselves, tap “Settings”, which will be second from the bottom of the list.
In the settings, tap “History and privacy”, which will be the fifth setting down.
To pause your watch history, tap the “Pause watch history” slider to the on position.
To disable the watch history, you’ll need to tap “Pause” in the confirmation box that appears.
If you want to clear your watch history too, you can tap the top option on this page, “Clear watch history”. You will also have to tap through a confirmation warning to complete this action.
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