Can youtube see my bookmarks?

[Astro Pen]

I don't like being profiled
I just want to know if they are spying on my lengthy bookmark list. Which as a writer contains research on many things, like, say, fentanyl and improvised explosive devices,
So I enter the, I thought, simple question
"can youtube see my bookmarks"
Can I find a straight answer? No. Complete obfuscation, only answers to a bookmark question I did not ask.
The same with "Can google see my bookmarks" btw
Try it yourself.
So my best guess is that they do read them and profile you on that basis.

 

[HareBrain]

YouTube and Google are owned by the same people. If you use Chrome, YouTube will know what you've been browsing.

I would guess that if you put your question into a non-Chrome browser, you might get a straight answer.

 

[HareBrain]

I've just remembered something weird from a couple of weeks ago.

I was in my normal coffee shop, and they were playing some music I hadn't heard before, but which I worked out was a collection of kind of lounge piano versions of music from Studio Ghibli films. This interested me, so I talked about it to the staff on my way out.

That very evening, I looked at my YouTube home page and second screen down was a video called "Ghibli piano". I'd never seen (or at least noticed) it before, and haven't since.

If I'd had a smartphone on me in the coffee shop, I would have assumed the worst. But I had no phone at all (nor internet-connected laptop). For it to *not* be a coincidence, the cafe's system would have to recognise my voice (from when I'm chatting to staff when they log my purchases for their loyalty system), match it to my email (which they have), and be linked to Google. I guess that's theoretically possible, but it's CIA-level stuff. Pattern recognition is a potentially dangerous thing.

 

[tinkerdan]

They don't so much look at bookmarks as they do look at cookies.
Cookies are the go to for information about where you have been along with other preferential information about your interaction with various sites. They are the means for analytics to collect information for websites whose owners pay google for ad space and location on search pages.

What I have noticed is that anywhere I have searched using google and a few other browsers affects the advertising that I get on various sites.

However it goes deeper than that because I use Gmail accounts and my mail received often influences the same ads.

This is one of the main reasons that cookie use has to be announced the first time a person navigates to a site. Once you accept their cookie policy it is open season for information retrieval on anything on that site.