Ask HN: Does Google link my YouTube and Google Search account if I'm logged out? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does Google link my YouTube and Google Search account if I'm logged out?

7 pointswhite_box10 comments

If I'm logged out of Google in Firefox, does Google still link my Youtube and Google Search account?

Yes.

Google (and plenty of others) uses IP addresses, browser fingerprinting, etc to link anonymous accounts & browsing sessions together.

damn, I really like using google as i think it's the most advanced search engine but it also bothers me how they do that stuff. ideally i want to isolate the search engine. but it also reduces usability if i will use a vm or a different browser

You can't be logged out of both. If you sign into one you are signed into both.

I mean, if I log into one, I'm gonna be logged in for both. If I logged out from one, I'm gonna be logged out from both.

I just wonder, does it link these two "anonymous" accounts (when I'm logged out from both)

I don't think I understand, you have a google search account? Not a gmail account or account for other google service?

I meant it's a Google account overall, is it not? I log into Gmail or Youtube or on a Google Search page, and I get signed in on all of them

English is not my native language, probably it's not perfect, I'm sorry

Ok, my wife uses my computer a lot, so I'm not sure how well Google 'understands' we are different people using the same computer or just thinks that she and I, and really all my family are all the same person and for some strange reason go through periods of reading about either tech news, Italian media, or when my daughter gets a hold of it, roblox.

However right now in the same browser that I am typing this, if I open mail.google.com, it is logged in as me. And when I go to youtube.com it is logged in as my wife. So there seems to be some sort of difference between the various accounts maintained by Google.

On YouTube, try clicking the icon in the top right and seeing if you have multiple accounts or "Switch accounts" show up.

yes they know I have multiple accounts I access, I'm just saying that I can be logged in on different accounts on the different services which is how I understood the original question?

There isn't any anonymity. Google "partners" with many ISPs (Comcast, for example), co-locates equipment, and they can link your current DHCP address to your customer name. It doesn't matter whether you even have an account with a Google service.

Before they had ISP account data, they knew the DHCP pool sizes and watched DNS lookups to identify users with a sufficient accuracy for most purposes. Most people visit a specific handful of sites, often at specific times or in a specific order.

For users coming in countries with better privacy laws, or through ISPs too small to be "partnered", Google buys tracking cookie information from various sources. There are hundreds (thousands?) of companies in that business. Cookie tracking isn't as good for finding your specific identity, but it's very specific about where you go and what you look at, which is primo information for marketing purposes.

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