It’s Not Just YouTube (AI Age Estimation), it’s Google’s Ecosystem

Much of the recent focus has been on YouTube rolling out their AI age guestimation system starting from today in the U.S. However, little has been really focused on the broader scope of this system where Google will be rolling out this AI age estimation to more of their U.S. based services in the coming weeks (this was also written about by Google at the end of July).

Both of these are starting with a small pool of U.S. based accounts (YouTube starting today and other parts of Google’s vast ecosystem in the coming weeks). Thus just because ones YouTube account is still alright today, doesn’t mean it will be in the future (as this system is rolled out past that initial limited pool). Similarly, Google’s tracking is a good portion of the privacy section in ones Google account’s page that many tend to ignore. YouTube’s history tracking is stored not only on YouTube, but also on Google (along with the rest of your activities). These are a few (not all) of the “signals” that the company is using in their AI age guestimation system.

Users need to go to Google (their account profile) and turn off a lot of that to not have that activity tracked.

All of these categories can be toggled off. Clicking into them will also tell you how Google determined some of that info (or you can fill in that information yourself which is something you DO NOT want to do – why volunteer any of that info UNLESS you want to feed their system bad data). This is on my main account BUT I had my Blogger accounts on different e-mail addresses (thus all the topics I wrote about including my industry related stuff never did cross over to those accounts based on looking at their activities; much of that using tracking blockers/any method to prevent as much of their activity tracking).

All of these need to be turned off if you don’t have a good system of blocking tracking. The YouTube history is an additional store of what’s tracked on YouTube. If you turn this off though, your main feed on YouTube will always be blank. For those who self-curate (to keep the algorithm reasonable in what is recommended), this can be kept enabled (but make sure to use something like Privacy Badger at minimum if not using a privacy focused browser).

You can choose to disabled AND remove your entire YouTube history; the manage history section will show you every video your account has viewed. This history is a key component to how the algorithm on YouTube populates your feed and what videos to recommend.

Completely disabling personalized ads acts sort of like a master control switch. However, I’d still recommend disabling those categories first, turn off web app activity tracking, and areas you’ve used Google just for good measure first. Google says they “respect your privacy” but it should be clear I take what many of these companies say with a huge block of salt (and thus why I am de-Googling/de-platforming as much as reasonably possible since I simply do not trust them).