I mentioned in another thread, that YouTube certainly knows your watch history, and every other history, even when you disable/delete them. The only person you're hurting by disabling it is yourself, because you lose your access. YouTube's gonna collect it, use it, sell it, and leak it, eventually. Have fun.

For any given service, the only control you have over data collection is going to be the telemetry under a banner such as "Make YouTube Better!" "Send Crash Reports!" "Enable Debugging Data". Any sort of routine data is collected, no matter what settings you put in. I always turn my history/timeline settings up to MAX, never delete, because I know those are the settings most beneficial to me personally.

Plenty of data is collected that you aren't even aware of. Most people don't realize the intrusive nature of a modern browser or mobile device now. They can check your scrolling, dwell times, time spent on page (did you ever wonder why that annoying popup comes just at the wrong moment?) attempts to leave page, mouse movements: any twitch you make with the keyboard or mouse gets noticed and sent back to mothership.

Tell HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37157835

CNet article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151135

Wow, low engagements.

I believe there's a technical term for this in the EU: illegal. If it comes out that they didn't delete data that was requested to be deleted beyond reasonable technical measures and they actually used it, that's most certainly going to rain fines. Given the increasing appetite in the EU for handing out these fines, I'm not sure YouTube is taking it so lightly.

Well hmm. I may be totally wrong on those points. None of the articles I surveyed support my claims. They may be poor-quality articles, I don't know. None of them explicitly say that YT silently keeps track even with history off. So these controls may be really doing what they say on the tin.

It's strange though: I do recall somewhere in the Googleplex, something telling me that turning off history wouldn't disable collection. Was it in Maps? Some other product? I don't know, but now I feel weird about it.

I'm sorry if I caused confusion about these points. Please accept my retraction and apologies.

No worries, on a technical level I'm sure they have the data somewhere, but that's most likely in a backup or a replication mechanism. However, if it somewere someone would know about and they would use it, it would have come out.

The recommendations for me were ok so far, but clearly not based on my watch history. It's mildly annoying that they are gone now.

Okay, well, if I understand this correctly, the home screen is blank and has no recommendations for you. Why do you want a home screen? You want recommendations? If you want recommendations then clearly the deal is to enable history. If you don't want recommendations then there's a blank home screen. It's a trade: you're not required to enable history, and YT's not required to recommend anything.

Is the dialog preventing you from navigating to Subscriptions, Library, or other screens? It seems like the dialog's just livening up an empty space, really.

Incorrect. The "home" page had recommendations with watch history turned off before. They were able to get this from likes and saved videos, and if they had no likes or saved videos they would recommend based on another algorithm that involved locality, language, age, and generally popular videos.