Google Chat stores the chat you have with others or in a room over the platform with the default settings in place. For threaded conversations, the history turned on and the chat is stored. You can access the thread in the chat window itself.

One of the major concerns that users have is organizations monitoring their activity if their chat history is turned on. When new people are added to the room, they can view the past messages. Some of these can be construed as disadvantages of turning on chat history by a large section of the users.

Before you turn off the chat history for good, an in-depth understanding of the concept and problems you might face is a must. For instance, when you share files with chat history disabled, they don’t appear in the ‘Files’ section of the chat. So before sharing a file, you will have to turn on chat history.

If you disable the chat history feature, any messages that you send will disappear automatically after 24 hours. Also, anyone in

Now that you have read how turning off the chat history will affect your conversations and file sharing, you can easily make a decision.

Turning Off Chat History in Google Chat Web App

Open the Google Chat web app on your computer or go to chat.google.com and open the chat/thread for which you wish to turn off history.

Next, click on the downward-facing triangle right-next to the person or conversation name to open the conversation specific chat settings.

Select ‘Turn off history’ from the drop-down menu to disable chat history.

You will now see a prompt in the thread mentioning that you have turned off chat history. Also, the text box at the bottom now says ‘History is off’ instead of ‘History is on’, as was the case earlier.

Turning Off Chat History in Google Chat Mobile App

When you open the mobile app, all the conversations are displayed on the home screen. Tap on the conversation for which you wish to turn off chat history.

Next, tap on the right-arrow next to name of the person or conversation.

On the Conversation options screen, tap on the toggle switch next to the ‘History is on’ option to turn off chat history.

After the chat history is turned off, ‘History is off’ will appear in place of ‘History is on’ as was the case earlier, and the color of the toggle will change from blue to grey.

Also, you will see a prompt in the chat window mentioning that you have turned off the chat history and the same will also be visible in the text box at the bottom where you type messages.

Turning off chat history in Google Chat and having it automatically delete new messages in 24 hours is a great feature for everyone looking to keep their conversations private and safe from prying eyes.

If you don’t want to have chat history turned off forever, you can momentarily turn it off for any sensitive discussion and then turn it back on the same way you turned it off. Any messages sent or received while the chat history was off will delete after 24 hours and won’t be recoverable in any way.