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A comment on Alternatives to Google Products. Parent comment

Re:Alternatives to Google Products by shawn on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:58AM (#17282581)
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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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by halflings on Monday June 11, 2018 @04:14AM (#17282654)
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).
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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by shawn on Monday June 11, 2018 @04:26AM (#17282697)
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.

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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by 0xmaverick on Monday June 11, 2018 @03:23PM (#17287623)
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" ?
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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by shawn on Monday June 11, 2018 @05:47PM (#17288905)
If a current employee is willing to vouch for it, that carries some weight. It's a useful data point.
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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by kerberos84 on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @09:46AM (#17293162)
Because google makes its revenue from user data.
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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by 0xmaverick on Thursday June 14, 2018 @09:45PM (#17316896)
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.
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Re:Alternatives to Google Products by jgtrosh on Monday June 11, 2018 @08:09AM (#17283564)
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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