Are they inherently opposite of each other? Do they contradict with each other in nature? Or is there an elegant solution to the privacy and personalized content suggestion dilemma?
I ask this because I do quite like personalized content on social media platforms and streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix. I also like my search engines to be optimized for my personal preferences profile so I can have more accurate search results. But I don’t want my preferences and personal data to be known by big tech or sold to other parties.
Privacy Guide suggested using RSS feed for content subscription such as YouTube and Reddit. This way I can still get my feed of chosen content subscription, but there is no personalized content suggestion.
I know a decentralized alternative to YouTube called Odysee or LBRY. This eliminates the big tech problem, but can they be trusted for personal data like preferences for personalized recommendations?
My current workaround/compromise is to register an anonymous account for each platform so that the data is harder to be cross-referenced.
That is a trade-off between privacy and convenience. I used LibreTube before and than I was really tired to see non-relevant suggestion or dumb trending videos, so I tried using YouTube than and it works way better, for the price they know my interests now. As I have no ads anyway I guess let they know it than…, also there is an option to auto-delete watch history starting from 3 monthes minimum, which is also good option.
You don’t even need an account for recommendations though, but you will need either an App or maybe the browser with the Cookies. Deleting every 3 months is as good as nothing, as 3 months is a huge time period
LLM’s seem to be decent at recommendations. Just ask one for whatever you’re looking for. They don’t perform well with obscure requests, but I doubt most streaming services have better algorithms.
PG doesn’t yet recommend any, but they’re being discussed here:
That is a short time suggestions, maybe for just seen video, that is what I do not like actually, Revanced has an option to fully prevent any suggestions after video ends. You watched 1 video now go do something else lol.
3 monthes of history changes how your home page of youtube appears, based on that history there will be similar videos. I would use less, like 1 month, but there is no such option. At least the page looks okey now, without that history stored it shows you popular and trending videos, which are useless trash.