I do the same thing, and always wonder that too. These companies have been caught lying consistently and repeatedly about what they collect and how, so even with all the right settings I’m very skeptical that they actually respect my choices.
i have only YouTube enabled (personalization is good enough that i actually do care about it) and google search (since it also affects google maps) and both are set to the lowest auto delete option
In your google account settings there should be a page called “Data And Privacy” that has loads of things to turn off or at least limit the amount of time before they say they delete it.
They keep changing where it is and how the pages are laid out in order to keep us on our toes. I think there may be a privacy center somewhere too. There used to be.
My best guess is that they instead aggregate your data and serve ads based off of basic demographically information - instead of data they’ve harvested from your Google account. E.g. they’ll use your age range, gender, region, etc
I have all my histories turned off and once a year or so I go in and make sure they haven’t added anything new for me to turn off.
Now the question is, are they really not collecting my data or have I just made it so I can’t see what they have on me?
They collected incognito session info, whose entire existence was ‘not keeping a history’, so almost 100% the latter.
I do the same thing, and always wonder that too. These companies have been caught lying consistently and repeatedly about what they collect and how, so even with all the right settings I’m very skeptical that they actually respect my choices.
i have only YouTube enabled (personalization is good enough that i actually do care about it) and google search (since it also affects google maps) and both are set to the lowest auto delete option
How do you turn them off. I mean, do you go through every Google product and dig for the settings? Or do you just mean you revisit the ad settings?
In your google account settings there should be a page called “Data And Privacy” that has loads of things to turn off or at least limit the amount of time before they say they delete it.
They keep changing where it is and how the pages are laid out in order to keep us on our toes. I think there may be a privacy center somewhere too. There used to be.
My best guess is that they instead aggregate your data and serve ads based off of basic demographically information - instead of data they’ve harvested from your Google account. E.g. they’ll use your age range, gender, region, etc