Over the past 2–3 years, I’ve developed a habit: whenever I want to search for something on YouTube or watch content outside my main areas of interest, I switch to incognito mode. This is my way of keeping my main feed clean and relevant to my preferences.
Lately, however, I’ve noticed something unsettling. Occasionally, a video I watched in incognito mode would inexplicably show up in my main feed. At first, I was confused. Then it started happening more often—videos I had never clicked on but were clearly related to the genre I had explored in incognito mode would surface in my recommendations. Naturally, I avoided engaging with them, but the pattern was unmistakable.
Up to this point, I felt uneasy about YouTube’s recommendation system, but what pushed me to write about this was something even more alarming. Recently, YouTube started recommending videos I had watched in entirely different browsers—Samsung Internet on my phone and Firefox/Opera on my PC—while I wasn’t logged in to my account.
I understand that Google Chrome tracks users even in incognito mode [1], but discovering that YouTube tracks behavior across different browsers, operating systems, and sessions, without being logged in, feels downright invasive. It’s mind-boggling and deeply concerning.
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1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/going-incognito-in-chrome-doesnt-mean-youre-not-being-tracked-now-confirmed-by-google
Users in the EU can choose to have all, some, or none of Google's services such as Search, YouTube, and Chrome share their data. You can automate it with consent-o-matic extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consent-o-matic/
In the US this is just the way it is.
Chrome’s Incognito Mode is not private. Google Updates Chrome's Incognito Warning to Admit It Tracks Users in ‘Private’ Mode https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-incognito-mode-privacy-wa...