You and your date finish eating a wonderful meal together, and you share the cleanup so that you can get done quicker. As he or she works on rinsing off the last few utensils and putting them in the dishwasher, you pop a bag of popcorn in the microwave and use our favorite wine opener to open a lovely bottle of red. The microwave beeps just as you finish pouring the second glass of wine, so you remove the bag of popcorn and empty it into a bowl before walking over to drop it on the coffee table next to the wine glasses. You plop down on the couch and your partner joins you as you turn on the TV and fire up the Netflix app. You choose your profile and get ready to watch a movie when it happens… the first title in your “Continue Watching” list is High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Good luck explaining that one, stud.
Look, we’ve all got our guilty pleasures and we all watch movies and shows that we probably wouldn’t want the world to know about. It’s fine. But we’d still rather not broadcast our guilty pleasures to our friends and family, right? Don’t worry, it’s actually easier than you might think to wipe those embarrassing movies and shows from your Netflix viewing history so nothing like the scenario above ever plays out for you.
Many people think that once they’ve watched something, it’s in their Netflix history forever like an arrest record. We can assure you that’s not the case. And of course, there are more reasons to remove things from your viewing history than just to hide guilty pleasures from your friends and family. Sometimes you watch something that skews Netflix’s recommendations and you’d get better results if you delete it from your watch history. Don’t worry, it’s very simple to erase the past on Netflix.
- Log in and select your profile on the “Who’s watching?” screen
- Hover over your profile icon in the top-right corner to open the drop-down menu, then select Account
- Scroll down to the My Profile section and select Viewing activity
- Scroll to the title or titles you want to remove and click the 🚫 icon
That icon is actually a “Hide from viewing history” button, and when you click it you’ll hide the title in question within 24 hours. If you hide an episode in a series rather than a one-off movie or special, you’ll then be given the option to hide the entire series from your viewing history. It’s that easy!
