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YouTube stops recommending videos when signed out of Google (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 8 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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YouTube is no longer showing recommended videos to users logged out of a Google account or using Incognito mode, making people concerned they are being bullied into always being signed into the service.

This change, which is now rolling out, shows a simple YouTube homepage without any videos or tips on what to watch.

As noted by some on X, users who have cleaned their search and watch history or turned off their history settings also see no suggestions when they're logged in. Some people think YouTube is being pushy about this, trying to make users turn on their history settings.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 45 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 40 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They could do what they did back in the day; show recommended videos based on the current one.

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

show recommended videos based on the current one.

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 7 points 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.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 12 points 8 months ago

Google has been perfectly happy to track you with browser fingerprints – just if they showed personalized results, it would be giving their hand away …

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 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 5 points 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 3 points 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.