The watch history feature on TikTok is great for those occasions when you find something interesting or compelling on the app and want to rewatch it again later that day or on another day.
Videos that you watch are stored in your watch history for up to 180 days, making it quick and easy to re-discover and watch them again.
But what happens when you don’t want your watch history to be tracked by TikTok? Here’s a quick guide to switching off this feature.
Where to Find Watch History
First and foremost, let’s find the watch history grid so we know what we’re dealing with.
To find your recently watched videos and those that have shown up on your For You page, follow these steps…
- Head to your profile page on TikTok
- Click on the menu in the top right hand corner, indicated by the three horizontal lines
- In ‘Settings and Privacy’, find the ‘Activity Centre’ option
- Select ‘Watch History’ at the top of the menu
You will now see a grid that’s filled with all the videos you have recently watched or seen on the app. You can click on any one of these to watch it again, adding it to your favourites should you want to keep it handy for a longer period.
It is worth noting before we move on that only feed videos are stored here – Live streams and TikTok stories do not stay available in your watch history folder.
3 Steps to Turn off Watch History
- Head to the same ‘Activity Centre’ menu as above and click through to your Watch History
- Tap on the Settings button in the top right hand corner
- Switch off the toggle for Watch History
You can also delete all the existing videos stored in this grid by manually deleting them on at a time or selecting them all and doing a mass delete.
Once deleted, not only will these videos no longer be available to find quickly though your Settings, but you may find that your view and the impact this has on your TikTok algorithm also disappears. This may affect the kinds of videos you see in your For You feed.
We hope this helps! Watch history can be a really beneficial and efficient way of finding videos that you’ve watched and enjoyed in the past – but this information is not always necessary or needed. If in doubt, or if browsing on another device that isn’t yours, switching off this toggle protects your view history from other eyes.
