Hacker News Reader

Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

How far does YouTube Premium go as far as privacy? I never took a look at it carefully.

My fear is I would pay the fee for no ads, but Google would still collect data on what I view and monetize that by selling me ads somewhere else.

View on HN

YouTube Premium does nothing to stop Google using your youtube history to profile you and letting advertisers target ads at you on other sites using Google's data which is partially built on the youtube profiling.

By not loading the ads at all, it may stymie non-Google ad networks attempts to profile you.

YouTube ads are based on your watch history, not some tracking pixel, so even a regular ad blocker on YouTube.com only blocks ads and doesn't help with privacy.

I suspect that since you're a paying user, a more valuable customer, they'd want to mine your data more thoroughly to derive more profits in other ways.

I would suspect the opposite, once you start paying you go from being a product to being a customer.

If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.

In a normal world that would make sense but we're dealing with businesses and MBAs who need to incessantly increase their revenue. As a paying customer they could squeeze more, you're willing to pay. Non-paying customers are used as a product themselves but it's extremely hard to extract more.

That's just normal business though, and my statement is intrinsically correcting for that.

Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote*)

Netflix productions do content placement. It's pretty sneaky and they do use social media accounts for shenanigans like fake posts on subreddits asking "What was that jacket in TVShow S03E04?" and another account responding with a link. Big brands with recognizable logos also do product placement on those. For fantasy shows they aim to own the merchandise distribution, but for stuff that happens on the real world there's always product placement and webpage placement and stuff like that going on.

I hardly see product placement as being even remotely close to what YouTube is doing. Its probably one of the most innocuous forms of advertising. Imagine a YouTube where the worst you can come up with is a guy drinking a coke during his video.

Yes, because it's done in moderation. Imagine if that was ramped up and 90% content was turned into product placement..

I was watching lost in space and one of those episodes had an entire subplot about Oreos. It was so blatant it ruined that episode.

Why wouldn't they mine the data of all their users super thoroughly (to their technical limits)? It only costs a bit of computer time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com