Google enables advertisers a look into your browsing history…

  • mvilain
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    1 year ago

    They already did this with Youtube. I turned of Youtube history because I didn’t want anyone being able to track what I watch. All of a sudden, Youtube’s home page for my account was blank with a message that said “Turn on history if you want to see recommendations”. I sat with that for a couple days, going to Youtube to check out channels I’d subscribed to. It wasn’t the same. When I got to Youtube for some distraction, I want to discover something different from my usual stuff. So I delete my history weekly as part of “routine maintainence”.

    • Tsunami45chan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Same I delete all my history in clean state on youtube. I hate seeng videos thay I’ve already watched before.

        • Jaggle@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Exactly! Erasing your history just means YOU can’t see it anymore.

      • mvilain
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        1 year ago

        Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

        Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

        Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

        Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

        Now all I see is this: “Ad Blockers violate Youtube’s Terms of Service”

        Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

        I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That deletion strategy is useless. They can still retain that information indefinitely.

      Just use the search bar.