How to Clear Browsing Data in Chrome for iPhone or iPod Touch

Free Space and Recover Privacy by Deleting Saved Browsing Data

Cropped image of teenage girl using mobile phone
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by Scott Orgera
Scott Orgera has been a tech journalist since 2007. He has 25+ years' experience as a programmer and QA leader and several Microsoft certifications.
Updated October 15, 2018

The Google Chrome app on the iPhone and iPod touch stores data on your device as you browse the web — saving information including browsing history, cookies, cached images and files, saved passwords, and autofill data.

These items remain on your device even after you've closed the browser. While this sometimes-sensitive information can prove useful for future browsing sessions, it can also present both a privacy and security risk as well as a storage challenge.

Because of these inherent risks, Chrome allows users to delete these data components either individually or everything in one fell swoop.

Delete Chrome's Browsing Data on the iPhone/iPod Touch

These steps are relevant only to Chrome for the iPhone and iPod touch. See how to do this in Windows if you're using Chrome there.

  1. Open the Chrome app.

  2. Tap the menu button at the top right corner. It's the one with three vertically stacked dots.

  3. Scroll down until you find Settings, and select it.

  4. Open the Privacy settings.

  5. At the bottom, choose Clear Browsing Data.

  6. Select all the areas you want to delete from Chrome by tapping each one individually. Clearing Chrome's browsing data does not delete bookmarks, erase the app from your phone or iPod, or sign you out of your Google account.

  7. Tap the Clear Browsing Data button when you've selected what should be deleted.

  8. Choose Clear Browsing Data once more to confirm.

  9. When that last pop-up goes away, you can tap DONE to exit the settings and return to Chrome.

What Chrome's Browsing Data Options Mean

Chrome's saved data include:

  • Browsing History: A record of every website you've visited since the last time you cleared the history. You can access these previously viewed sites via Chrome's History screen in the main menu.
  • Cookies, Site Data: Cookies and other website data are files placed on your iPhone or iPod touch when you visit certain sites. Each cookie is used to tell a web server when you return to its page. Cookies can be helpful in remembering certain settings that you have on a website, as well as important information such as login credentials.
  • Cached Images and Files: Chrome for iPhone and iPod touch uses its cache to store images, content, and URLs of recently visited web pages. By using the cache, the browser can render these pages much faster on subsequent visits by loading the images, etc. locally from your device's cache rather than from the web server itself.
  • Saved Passwords: When you enter a password on a website for something like your email or bank, Chrome will usually ask if you want it to remember the password. If you choose yes, it will be stored on your device or in the cloud and then populated the next time you visit that particular page, similar to a built-in password manager.
  • Autofill Data: In addition to passwords, Chrome also stores other information that you enter into web forms, like your name, address, payment information, etc. This data is then used by the browser's Autofill feature to populate similar fields during subsequent sessions.