How To Clear Your Amazon Browsing History

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the VideoSecu ML531BE TV Wall Mount for most 22″-55″ LED LCD Plasma Flat Screens – up to 88 lb, currently being offered for $29.59 on Amazon—that’s 76% off its regular price of $125. Advertisers make it possible for Digital Media Mom to bring you great content each day for free, so thanks for your support.

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You Were Looking At WHAT?!

By default, Amazon tracks your browsing history and uses that information to present you with “recommended” and “related” items right there on the front page of the Amazon site. This can be a problem if you share a computer.

Maybe you were browsing potential birthday gifts for someone else in the household, and you were hoping to keep those gift ideas to yourself until the big reveal on the big day. Maybe you were searching for something G-rated and a database error caused some X-rated items to come up in your list, or maybe you got one of those “You gotta see this!” links from a friend and clicked it only to find yourself on the product page of something very adult or very bizarre.

No worries! Digital Media Mom’s got your back and can tell you how to turn off your Amazon browsing history.

The Easy Steps To Turn Off Amazon Browsing History

The screenshots tell the story here. Login to the Amazon site and click the Your Account link, then scroll all the way down to the Personalization area. As shown below, there’s a link on that screen for View And Edit Your Browsing History, as well as one for Your Browsing History Settings (click or tap on images to view an enlarged version in a new tab or window):

AmznBrowseHistorySettingLink

If you want to leave Browsing History on but just remove specific items from your history, use the View And Edit Your Browsing History link. You’ll be taken to a screen that displays your Browsing History, with links to delete any individual items shown there.

If you want to delete your entire Browsing History and turn off Browsing History tracking going forward, click the Your Browsing History Settings link to go to the Browsing Settings screen (shown below), and click that big yellow button to turn off Browsing History:

AmznBrowseHistoryTurnOff

Note that after you turn off Browsing History, the home page of Amazon will still include a ‘Recommendations Based On Your Browsing History’ block, as shown below, but it will no longer be based on your Browsing History. Instead it will be based solely on your purchases (blue arrow). It seems the ‘based on your browsing history’ text there is hard-coded, meaning it shows up whether you’ve turned off Browsing History or not. But I can tell you that after I turned off my own Browsing History to test for this post, nothing I’d recently browsed showed up in the ‘recommendations’ area.

AmznBrowseHistoryAfterTurnedOff

How To Hide Specific Purchases

If there are specific items you’ve purchased that you want to be sure will NOT show up in the ‘recommendations’ area, go back to Your Account > Personalizations and click the Improve Your Recommendations link (it’s to the right of the ‘Browsing History’ links – see first screenshot). On the Improve Your Recommendations page you’ll find a list of purchases there, and next to each one there’s a checkbox for “Don’t use for recommendations”. Just click that box for anything you don’t want to show up.

Now you can browse Amazon in partial or complete privacy!

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And now…

The VideoSecu ML531BE TV Wall Mount for most 22″-55″ LED LCD Plasma Flat Screens – up to 88 lb has an average review rating of 4.5/5 stars across over 5,300 customer reviews and normally sells for $125, but right now (as of 1/29/15) you can get it for just $29.59! Believe it or not, the package even includes a bubble level and 10′ HDMI cord. At the current price, even if you don’t need this item right now it can make a lot of sense to pick one up in anticipation of a future flat screen TV purchase. Eligible for free Prime shipping, too!

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Kindle/Fire Tech Tip of the Week: Use Amazon’s New Audible Matchmaker Tool to Find Whispersync For Voice Matches

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