Maybe it’s time for the return of curated lists. Back in the day (even before the web) there used to be people who organized lists of videos to rent, books to read, etc. why not bring it back in a lemmy channel or some other trusted service. Just curated lists of specific videos.

Regarding how quickly Instagram started sending them personal stuff... Letting an app access your location, especially if it's not a one-time authorisation, is basically telling it who you are.

There was a newspaper investigation recently on data brokers, they approached one to get a sample of their data. It was "anonymous" data, only in the sense it didn't contain names. Using Apple's advertiser ID, they had no problem building profiles from specific devices and could easily identify a lot of their own employees, simply because their routine around a location made it clear it was their workplace. And from there, it was not hard to find out on the data what their home address was.

It probably took only location for the burner phone Instagram to know that this is either the same person, or someone closely related to them.

I checked my phone’s location settings, and sure enough, Instagram had recently accessed this information.

The average tech-illiterate journo is always going to be dogshit at these "experiments" because they don't understand how most of the underlying tech works.

Other additions to my feed were harder to explain. ... One video featured a woman in a sari frying up South Indian dumplings called kuzhi paniyaram — an obscure dish my mum would make when I was growing up.

Yes, numbnuts. Your precise location, plus a hundred other data points you're ignorant of, associated the account with your mum. This journo probably doesn't even know that location access likely means visibility of all the wifi and bluetooth devices in your radius.

If this is late stage cap journalism, in the age of omnipresent surveillance capitalism, it's time to pack it in. We're well and truly cooked. Welcome to costco, I love you!

Turning off your history on YouTube prevents them from sending recs to the home screen. I only use the subscriptions tab

If she accessed Instagram from the same home network (and IP address) as her main phone, the zuckerbots inferred that the two users were probably in the same household and knew each other/had similar interests.

I like NewPipe for this reason.

My feed is what I've subscribed to and only what I subscribed to.

My wife and I have been saying "I'd really like to try parasailing" or "I wonder what parasailing is like?" or variations on parasailing, to see if it eventually pops up in our youtube feed. Two weeks so far and nothing yet. Said it about twenty times so far.

The best way to use YT, is to have a bookmark folder linking to the recent video list (Descending by release date) of the channels you enjoy.

YT/Google by definition (large American technology company) cannot be trusted.

My YouTube feed seems okay, recently they started promoting new crap but pressing "don't recommend channel" and "not interested" silenced it.

If I watch something from a channel I don't want to get recommended I remove it from my watch history and I never press "like" on videos.

It's good to see all the comments with ways to manage your YouTube feed, good to know if I end up in the same situation with a poisoned algorithm.