• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    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?

    • BertramDitore@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

    • Randelung@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      They collected incognito session info, whose entire existence was ‘not keeping a history’, so almost 100% the latter.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        It just not stores the session >_> Nothing was ever fully incognito about it beyond the icon looking like a spy.
        Also it’s made by Google. Not much of a surprise.

        Now for Firefoy I would be interested.

        • otp@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          I never assumed that incognito mode did anything more than not save my history and searches in my browser. And maybe some other stuff like cache and cookies.

          It took me a while to realize that less tech-savvy people wouldn’t know about that stuff and assume that it meant that Google isn’t watching you.

          And unless you’re very privacy-conscious, even your ISP knows where you get your internet porn from

    • stratoscaster@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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

    • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      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

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      6 months ago

      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?

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        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.