YouTube tracking: This is how much Google knows about you; here is how to STOP it

YouTube tracking: Google knows lot about you and if you are on YouTube, check these settings to quickly stop the company in its tracks.

YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing platform and is used by companies, educators, activists, content creators, and users all around the world and like Google, it is operated by parent company Alphabet. The company’s services are tied to your Google account, and while using YouTube can be quite educational and informative, the service can also learn a lot about your interests and likes, and these can be used to show you targeted ads that might make some users uncomfortable. And yes, Google makes money this way, lots of money.

While there is no close contender to a service that can compete with YouTube that you could migrate to, there are some ways to prevent Google from using the data it learns about you from tracking you for targeted advertising. Users should be very worried about data collected from a platform like YouTube, because it can show details about their browsing, political views, economic status, interests and much more. Since this data can be tied to their Google Account, it can provide a very wide image of what users do online, which can have a detrimental effect on privacy.

YouTube knows what you watched online: Check your history here

If you want to check how much of your YouTube history is already visible to Google, you can visit Google’s data and privacy page, which can be found in your Google Account. This contains all the activity of your Google Account which includes your Google Search history, your Google Assistant history and other privacy controls. The YouTube section should show all the videos you have watched while logged into YouTube.

Stop YouTube from tracking you for personalised ads

From the previously mentioned privacy dashboard, users can check their YouTube watching history, and then decide whether they want YouTube to store their history going forward. This means that you can instruct the service to stop recording a log of all the videos you watched. Users must choose the “Pause” option that will stop the service tracking your watched videos.

Those who do not want to turn off their watching history on YouTube can use the dashboard to instruct the company to automatically delete your viewing history after three months, 1.5 years and 3 years. Finally, you can delete your existing watch history and visit Google’s Ad Personalisation page in your Google Account settings to instruct the company not to show you personalised ads based on your personal information, which should reduce the targeted advertising you receive to a large extent.