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Comment by shawn | Hacker News Reader

Google has what I think is the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads).

I don't think this stops Google from collecting your viewing history. If it did, Youtube recommendations wouldn't work at all, because they would know nothing about what I like or don't like. But I'm pretty sure recommendations work regardless of your settings -- meaning you're being tracked.

I happen to like the recommendations, so I don't mind this. But it's a hard problem.

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The second link I posted allows you to explicitly disable search and viewing history on YouTube, which also disables recommendations (at least those based on your profile; you will still get recommendations after watching a specific video).

Fair enough, though that would require me to sign in.

Does that actually prevent the data from being stored on Google's servers? I'd like to believe that the data isn't being vacuumed up regardless of what the user says, so if you're willing to vouch for it then that would mean a lot.

How can you ever trust anyone like that ? Unless, you see the line of code that is deleting the data ?. It's kind of unfair when people on HN take Apple by their word and for Google "oh is it really deleted though" ?

If a current employee is willing to vouch for it, that carries some weight. It's a useful data point.

Because google makes its revenue from user data.

Do you have a better solution ?. No one will use the products if it costs some non-trivial amount. And no this thread doesn't represent the billions of non-US non-rich people that use Google.

When logged in I have history disabled, and YouTube being kind of usable, with a lot of stupid content promoted, but at least not too much weird fixation on things I watched 5 years ago. When logged out I get the full fixation experience where I half the suggestions are aggravatingly repetitive personalized suggestions.

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