How privacy respecting is the reccommendations feature?

[AphoticUmbral]

What does google see and know when this option is enabled? How does google profile me when I use this?

[Priveetee]

Just to explain what I mean because there are two different things here: what the feed does right now and the experimental feature I’m working on for later

Right now: honestly, the feed is pretty hacky. It uses a few account signals but it doesn’t build a profile of ur interests from ur watch history. History is turned into a set of videos already seen:

// Keep watched video URLs so the feed can filter them out later
val seenUrls = historyItems.map { it.url }.toSet()

The current profile has no interest keywords, themes or personalized search queries:

keywordAffinity = emptySet(), // no interest keywords inferred from ur history
themeTokens = emptySet(),     // no interest themes built for the feed
themeQueries = emptyList(),   // no searches generated from those interests
personalizationEnabled = false,

Here’s the profile setup and here’s where watched videos are skipped

Discovery mostly comes from videos related to ur subscription feed and favorites plus trending videos:

candidates =
    relatedFromSubscriptions + // related to videos from ur subscription feed
    relatedFromFavorites +     // related to videos u favorited
    fetchTrending(serviceId)   // trending videos for that service

Then it ranks candidates with basic rules like recency and small fixed boosts for subscriptions, favorites and watch later. Here’s the candidate generation and the current scoring rules

Ur history stays on ur TypeType instance, meaning the server u use, but the TypeType server still asks YouTube for videos and related videos. YouTube can see which videos or channels those requests are about, but it doesn’t get ur full watch history or a TypeType profile

In the future: I’m working on a separate optional experimental feature for actual personalization. The recommendations will come from TypeType’s recommender, not YouTube’s recommendation feed. TypeType’s server may still search YouTube or ask for videos related to specific videos based on ur interests, so YouTube could infer some topics from those requests, but it won’t get ur full history or personalization profile

The goal is full transparency so u can see what data is used and stay in control of ur data. It’s almost there, I just need to figure out why it crashes one time out of two.

[Priveetee]

If u have any other question feel free to ask as many as u want ;)