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After knowing Google have been tracking few hundreds millions people's precise locations for the last 10+ years, I went thru the exercise of deleting all the a

by srcmap 7y ago

After knowing Google have been tracking few hundreds millions people's precise locations for the last 10+ years, I went thru the exercise of deleting all the activities history from Map, Youtube and Search and disable all activities tracking. For the first few hours, I see new default youtube suggestions. After a few days, I see a lot of old search/view videos pop back to the youtube home page. YT still seems "suggested" videos for me to watch base on the past viewing info.

bduerst 7y ago
It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.
- srcmap 7y ago
  But those "suggested" videos were something I watched months/years ago and not some recently watched after I deleted the view history.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    That's what I'm talking about. Think of the recommender model as your own personal neural net that is trained, over time, to show you videos it thinks you might like. It is not capable of telling you which videos you watched, because it is not a database or list of watched videos, but it is instead a classifier that predicts what you probably want to watch.
- givinguflac 7y ago
  This is a big reason I view the new “we’ll automatically delete your data!” Crap as disingenuous at best. They’ve already learned everything from the data in a few hours, it’s useless after that anyhow.
  - javagram 7y ago
    A big problem with data is not the company itself using it, but other ways it can come back to bite you. E.g. a sexual photo retrieved from a private social media album is no threat to your reputation when it’s been assumed into some machine learning model for detecting sexual photos, but it’s certainly a threat if a future data leak allows your enemies to get the actual .PNG or .JPG and send it to the news media or your loved ones. Knowing that the photo can actually be deleted is valuable in this case and I’m sure there are many other similar ones that could be listed.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Is that really a problem for users though? Users want to delete watch history, which they can. Classifier models predicting what you want to watch are not the video watch history, nor are the models capable of producing it.
    - teddyh 7y ago
      > Classifier models predicting what you want to watch But that probably is not the only model generated from your data, is it? They probably have many other models generated from your data, everything from ad-displaying models to profiling models for Hydra.
xmprt 7y ago
The model is probably based off of your watch history before you deleted everything. There would be no way (theoretically) for anyone to see your watch history but YouTube still thinks those old videos are ones that you'd be interested in and fortunately you haven't watched them yet (as far as the algorithm is concerned) so it's recommending them to you again.

by srcmap 7y ago

bduerst 7y ago

It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.

srcmap 7y ago
But those "suggested" videos were something I watched months/years ago and not some recently watched after I deleted the view history.
- bduerst 7y ago
  That's what I'm talking about. Think of the recommender model as your own personal neural net that is trained, over time, to show you videos it thinks you might like. It is not capable of telling you which videos you watched, because it is not a database or list of watched videos, but it is instead a classifier that predicts what you probably want to watch.
givinguflac 7y ago
This is a big reason I view the new “we’ll automatically delete your data!” Crap as disingenuous at best. They’ve already learned everything from the data in a few hours, it’s useless after that anyhow.
- javagram 7y ago
  A big problem with data is not the company itself using it, but other ways it can come back to bite you. E.g. a sexual photo retrieved from a private social media album is no threat to your reputation when it’s been assumed into some machine learning model for detecting sexual photos, but it’s certainly a threat if a future data leak allows your enemies to get the actual .PNG or .JPG and send it to the news media or your loved ones. Knowing that the photo can actually be deleted is valuable in this case and I’m sure there are many other similar ones that could be listed.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Is that really a problem for users though? Users want to delete watch history, which they can. Classifier models predicting what you want to watch are not the video watch history, nor are the models capable of producing it.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    > Classifier models predicting what you want to watch But that probably is not the only model generated from your data, is it? They probably have many other models generated from your data, everything from ad-displaying models to profiling models for Hydra.

xmprt 7y ago

The model is probably based off of your watch history before you deleted everything. There would be no way (theoretically) for anyone to see your watch history but YouTube still thinks those old videos are ones that you'd be interested in and fortunately you haven't watched them yet (as far as the algorithm is concerned) so it's recommending them to you again.