3 ms·

You are not wrong. But not right either. All those nice settings (for google and everyone else) are only for the minimum they are required by law. That means a

• Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  ...are they? In the US? One thing I really do appreciate about Google products is that I'm able to fully disable personalization. My Youtube homepage is completely depersonalized, because I went through their privacy settings and switched off everything. I can't say whether or not Google is still secretly tracking me, but my biggest concern is actually that algorithmic recommendations put me in a filter bubble. Google lets me turn off the bubble. Amazon, by contrast, does not let me depersonalize my recommendations. Neither does Netflix. There was a period of several years where I would periodically go through my Amazon history and manually mark everything as a gift. This worked for a time, but abruptly stopped one day. I assume Amazon decided I'd marked too many things as gifts and my selections should be ignored.
  • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
    Google gives you the illusion. Ads are still targeted just fine. Did you receive any ads in spanish or chinese recently? did you see any political ad to a party you vehemently oppose? All that is still decided by your profile and history. Just with hocus pocus anonymization on the front end. So google is not that different from netflix and amazon. they just give you a blanket.