Google has been perfectly happy to track you with browser fingerprints – just if they showed personalized results, it would be giving their hand away …
Comment on YouTube stops recommending videos when signed out of Google
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 8 months ago
Uh, how could Google show any personal recommendations without storing any data to base that on? If anything this seems to be Google actually doing what they say they’re doing.
cerement@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Cookies… But yes i noticed it too recently that you dont even get a homepage / trending list anymore when turning on proper privacy settings.
Aatube@kbin.social 8 months ago
They kinda don't! It'd be trending videos near your IP locations + your watch history for this browser session
someguy3@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Not personal recommendations, they won’t show anything. It would be like loading up Lemmy/Reddit and not seeing anything until you logged in or subscribed to a community.
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
They could do what they did back in the day; show recommended videos based on the current one.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
They still do in my recent experience.
It’s just not based on any longer viewing history than the current session.
The homepage rhat starts the viewing session will generally be just what’s popular with the general audience in the approximate location they can geolocate from your IP address. If you are logged out and try a few different locations on a VPN, you’ll get different homepages to start a new (logged out) session from.
archomrade@midwest.social 8 months ago
Yep.
Though there is still a reason to be upset IMHO, because I’ve had history turned off for several years now, but until recently I always had a home page with ‘recommended’ videos regardless, which to me indicates that they were not honoring my request before the recent data regulations went into effect in the EU, or were otherwise using data from other services or browsing history to base recommendations on.