Not just that. I have always turned of history and analytics since 2020. I use you tube to check news about happening events in my region(politics and stuff), so I can open the video on invidious or newpipe. But yesterday, as I opened you tube, it threw me this message... So, now I feel better, but seems, they have never stopped tracking what I search and watch, even when I opted to keep it off. Also maybe it is due to new feature where we can see the full video in hover mode, without clicking it to watch. But whatever, I wanted to let lemmy people to know that something like this happened yesterday to me.
Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you've been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn't change what data is collected, just whether the videos you've watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.
Not just that. I have always turned of history and analytics since 2020. I use you tube to check news about happening events in my region(politics and stuff), so I can open the video on invidious or newpipe. But yesterday, as I opened you tube, it threw me this message... So, now I feel better, but seems, they have never stopped tracking what I search and watch, even when I opted to keep it off. Also maybe it is due to new feature where we can see the full video in hover mode, without clicking it to watch. But whatever, I wanted to let lemmy people to know that something like this happened yesterday to me.
Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you've been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn't change what data is collected, just whether the videos you've watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.