By Anhar Khanbhai

Google’s privacy setting are set to get a major shake up in the way the search engine collates data about you, its users and today is the last day to alter your settings.

From March 1, the company will begin to collect all the information it acquires about its users who are logged in to Google services into a single, unified pool of data.

In the past, data collected in the course of a web search would be kept separate from, for instance, your YouTube viewing activity, your Gmail usage or your Map queries.

From Thursday, that will cease being the case unless you specifically erase your Google Web History as everything that has been collected about your past search activities and the sites you clicked through to, can be scooped up and combined with information gleaned from usage on other Google-owned sites.

The changes will allow Google to better target ads to users and in doing so, enable the company to extract a higher price from advertisers.

This is not unusual; all web publishers are attempting to deliver more targeted advertising. But not all publishers can combine as much information as Google can.

Google has taken the opportunity to unify some 60 separate privacy policies into one simpler document.

The company has also been up front about the coming changes and for the past few weeks has posted notices on its websites and emailed its users explaining the changes.

However, many users may have been oblivious to the new policies either because they may be more relaxed about privacy on the Internet or because they haven’t seen it all in detail.

Here is how you can quarantine your Google Search History from the new data aggregation process.

Go to the Google History page and sign in. If your Web History has been activated, you should see a button that says: “Remove All Web History”. Then click “Okay” to confirm. When this is done you will see a “Resume” button, which you can click if at any time in the future you change your mind.