This post shows students and new users how to turn off Activity history in Windows 11 and prevent storing your activity history to protect your privacy.
Windows 11 comes with a feature called Activity history. It helps keep track of the things you do on your computer, such as the apps and services you use, the files you open, and the websites you browse, etc.
Your activity history is stored locally on your device for the apps and services you use and website you visit.
Also, if you use a Microsoft account to login to your devices, your activity history is shared across other devices to bring you a single experience and provides you the ability to continue using the same activity history everywhere.
Activity history might be good for some folks, but for others, it’s a privacy nightmare.
Activity history is one of the many features that are available to use in Windows 11 for students and new users. It’s easy to enable or disable in Windows 11 and the steps below show you how to do that.
To get started with turning off Activity history in Windows 11, follow the steps below:
How to turn off Activity history in Windows 11
If you want to prevent Windows 11 from storing your Activity history, use the steps below to disable it.
Windows 11 has a centralized location for majority of its settings. From system configurations to creating new users and updating Windows, all can be done from its System Settings pane.
To get to System Settings, you can use the Windows key + i shortcut or click on Start ==> Settings as shown in the image below:
Alternatively, you can use the search box on the taskbar and search for Settings. Then select to open it.
Windows Settings pane should look similar to the image below. In Windows Settings, click Privacy & security, select Activity history on the right pane of your screen shown in the image below.
On the Activity history pane, uncheck the highlighted box to reads “Store my activity history on this device“. This will prevent Windows 11 from storing your activities on this device.
This does not mean that all tracking and all your activities will not be stored somewhere. Some of your browsing activities are stored in the browser and in Windows temporary files. Those you can also turn off by disabling tracking the browser.
How to clear Windows Activity history
To immediately clear our your activity history data in Windows 11, click the Clear button highlighted on the Activity history settings pane.
That should do it!
If you signed in with your Microsoft account and your activity history is synced with other devices, all your activities will be deleted across the other devices as well.
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to disable and clear Windows 11 Activity history to prevent storing your activities on the device. If you find any error above, please use the comment below to report.
