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Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

Google News has become completely worthless for me.

It takes my YouTube usage and promotes news stories based on that.

But that makes absolutely no sense. I go to YouTube to relax and/or look at things that are not so important. Sudoku solving, gaming news, and/or chess stuff.

I used to go to Google News to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world. But now my Google News feed is overridden by stories about the same things I see on YouTube.

Outside the main 2-3 stories of the day (which is invariably the top political news from the U.S. which one already knows about through the zeitgeist) everything else is personalized stories and hardly News.

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This is where Firefox Containers[1] rules. Just open all these sites in new containers and you can keep them siloed and apart (either not logged in, or under separate accounts). You can have as many as you want and have them auto-assigned based on the website.

It's actually an official Firefox project, although it comes as an extension. Though I think it should be a first class feature in the base install.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I wrote [1] to create disposable profiles for browsing, cleanly instantiated from pre-configured (with optional extensions) "root" profiles.

It's also convenient when researching a particular topic, as I can keep a dedicated per-topic browser instance self-contained in its own directory, for as long as I need it.

It does a good job in bypassing backend "personalization".

[1] https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private

Use google news in an incognito window?

You would need incognito, VPN'd, and non-JS tab to not be tracked by websites.

In my anecdotal experience, FB is using non-logged in google search results to select which ad to show you. I assume google sells those to FB, based on IP address.

But, my YouTube and Google search and ads, whole logged in, are based on what I do while logged in only. I might be naive but I have not seen correlation between my logged-in and my non-logged-in life within google products.

Another hypothesis: Silicon Valley is using your inner speech - obtained with electromagnetic surveillance and machine learning.

People try to explain it away as Big Tech's blackbox AIs being good of making inferences from "public" data, but fail to consider that their body betrays their mind by leaking information under the skin, which can be picked up silently with microwaves.

I am confused but very interested.

Do you have any sources or information I can look up to study this?

That's why I switches to running multiple browser profiles, along with multiple Google accounts when necessary. It keeps all those recommendations isolated from each other.

Just run Firefox and the multi container plugin. I also use the temporary containers plug-in which will open a new container with every new tab you open.

If you’re really bout it, get a few proxies and use foxyproxy to randomly route your tabs. Try to avoid too many fingerprinting prevention plugins because that actually makes you even more unique (according to effs panopticlick)

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