YouTube’s incognito mode is not entirely incognito | Hacker News Reader

YouTube’s incognito mode is not entirely incognito

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13 pointsiamspoilt3 comments

I have always felt that Youtube's incognito mode is not so incognito as it keeps on suggesting me videos of interest even after quitting and launching the session again. So I did a bit of investigation to figure out if this was actually the case.

I have recorded a demo video that seems to be validating my point.

The video is recored on a fresh install of Youtube on iOS 13.2.3. That means I uninstalled and installed the Youtube app. The demo that you would see is on the very first launch of the app.

Here is the timeline, also posted on the video description.

0:04 I am logged into my personal account. You can see Formula 1 video suggestions because I tend to follow Formula 1 quite a bit

0:10 I switch to incognito mode in Youtube. The popup says that once incognito is turned off, my activity from this session will be cleared. At this point, suggestions in incognito seem random to me

1:00 I search for Formula 1 while in incognito mode

1:26 Quit incognito mode. At this point, I believe that my session is cleared

1:35 I switch to incognito mode again. My video feed seems to be heavily skewed towards Formula 1 video suggestions. This holds for subsequent incognito mode activation as well

YouTube is a Google property and thus this should be no surprise from a company that makes it’s money from tracking.

It’s similar to the funding of the ‘anonymous’ network Tor by the US government:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/claims-tor-funded-by-us-g...

Always apply Occam’s Razor to sift through the purported claims.

It wasn't a surprise for me in the sense that I was already suspicious of this behaviour. I made this video as a proof. The problem is that if a product feature is being marketed as "incognito", it is inherently meant to wipe off all the session information for the duration of use. Youtube not respecting the choice of a user to go private as part of it's own provided feature is extremely misleading. Not sure if this is violating their own privacy terms or not.

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