YouTube Might Finally Get An Incognito Mode

Currently, you can head to the "History and Privacy" settings in YouTube and toggle on the options to pause watch and search history if you don't want the site to track your searches and watched videos, but that can be a bit complicated each time you want to search for something weird. According to Android Police, "YouTube will make it a little easier to go into incognito without digging into many settings and without having to disable it later." A new "Incognito Mode" will appear when you tap your account avatar in the top right of the app. From the report: With "Incognito Mode" on, all your activity from the current session is not saved and subscriptions are hidden too. It's as if you were signed out without being so, and there's a neat incognito icon replacing your avatar. If you turn off Incognito or become inactive on YouTube, you'll be back to using your own account.

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[GuB-42]

Browsers already have an incognito mode. The app didn't.

... or, you know ...

[TechnoLuddite]

... you could just, well, log out.

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[rmdingler]

Heh. You don't suppose youtube could serve a not so delicious cookie to your IP address that you didn't request, do you?

But yeah, it's probably that Benedict android phone... perhaps you could fabricate a miniature tinfoil hat for that malevolent little bastard.

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[UnknownSoldier]

How do you comment without logging in?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Catbeller]

A good chunk of YouTube is rated "adult" and requires a login. "Adult" means anything from ASMR to naughty words.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Why would you ever log in to watch youtube?

One wouldn't want to be tracked for one's innocent scientific interest in watching a medical exam video unofficially called "The Shocker", which could be misinterpreted as prurient interest.

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Problem is that half the videos on Youtube then become inaccessible because, just in case some snowflake might get offended by a comedian making a joke with a naughty word in it, they restrict them to logged-in users only. About the only thing you can safely watch en masse without being logged in is cat videos, World's Funniest Decapitation Accidents, and 10,000,000 videos of millenials whining about something.

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[omnichad]

This is called the frequency illusion or Baader Meinhof phenomenon. Basically, selective attention - it was going to be there regardless, but because it's something you've seen or discussed elsewhere recently it is more easily noticed.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is called the cucked Google fanboi delusion. Basically, Google did nothing wrong. A multinational corporation with billions of dollars and connection to alphabet agencies, built upon data collection and processing, surely would never do something like scrape audio for keywords in a similar fashion to what they already do with e-mail. Stop being mean to them, you bigot.

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[omnichad]

And then have to log in again because the content requires you to prove you are 18+, so I have heard.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently there are people (possibly most people) who just leave everything logged in.

I know, I know, I'm not one of them either, but I get the feeling we're the anomalies here.

Lies

[john of sparta]

call them what they are

Re:

[qzzpjs]

call them what they are

You're probably right. The easiest way to find the people that law enforcement wants to know about is to let you turn on a "don't watch me, I'm not doing anything sketchy" option.

Re: You know this is because of dudes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally I can watch hairy girls doing armpit farts without it showing in my history!

The youtube app has gotten very unstable lately

[Maxo-Texas]

it used to be fine but after the last round of updates after playing 7-10 videos it's hanging.

When is Google improving YouTube's interface?

[bogaboga]

I wonder why they don't first make YouTube's interface a little better: -

My gripes...

1: On the desktop version [using Windows 10 and Chrome], losing view of the video once I start scrolling through the comments. The same applies to videos I have designated as those to watch later.

2: No video controls? Contrast, brightness, hue etc etc...

I just do not get it.

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[epine]

The most ridiculous missing feature on YouTube is the inability to time-shift the audio track when some idiot uploads video with the audio badly out of sync.

Alternatively, Google's machine learning could correct this automatically, in most cases.

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[drinkypoo]

The most ridiculous missing feature on YouTube is the inability to time-shift the audio track when some idiot uploads video with the audio badly out of sync.

That is annoying, but you can solve it easily enough by downloading the video with youtube-dl and then time-shifting the audio with vlc :)

What annoys me most about the interface is that I can't tear off a tab, resize the window to an arbitrary size, and zoom the video to fill the window. Which is another problem which sends me to the downloader.

As an added bonus, when you use youtube-dl you never have to see an ad unless it's actually part of the video. Win-win!

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[antdude]

YouTube removed its damn classic design. The new one is so slow, big, bloated, etc.! Argh. :(

Re:Uh, why not use the browser's private mode

[jetkust]

They are talking about adding this to the YouTube Android App, not the website. If using the website, you still have to pause your history the old way I'm guessing. But even then your history would still be saved by your browser. So realistically you'd have to go into Incognito mode, AND pause your history too.

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[jetkust]

Right, but this article is about temporarily pausing history WHILE you are logged into your account.

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[swillden]

Right, but this article is about temporarily pausing history WHILE you are logged into your account.

If you're using a browser and you open an incognito browser window then you're not logged into your account. Not unless you go through the process of logging in from the incognito window, and why would you do that?

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[forkfail]

Incognito mode is a bit of a misnomer.

More like giving a kid a blanket and telling him if he hides under it, he is invisible.

pause watch and search history is a SCAM

[citizenr]

Iv had both watch and search history paused for years now, and somehow YT keeps recommending me videos relevant to the ones I watched few days ago, Magic!
They keep tracking that shit no matter what you do.

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[jetkust]

The same thing would happen if you didn't have an account. This is a fairly well established practice called browser fingerprinting. Google likely honored your request to not save search history on your account. But yes they are still tracking every single browser they can identify as unique. And though browser fingerprinting is supposed to be anonymous, it's hard to believe some correlation isn't going on there. Realistically though, these types of "Incognito" settings were never about hiding your act

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[thegarbz]

and somehow YT keeps recommending me videos relevant to the ones I watched few days ago

How did you find those videos? The pause watch and search history only applies to to your profile created from within Youtube. If you browse to youtube from some other site the resulting video ends up in your profile anyway.

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[Spacelord]

They also track you via cookies when you're not logged in.

Try this: create a clean browsing profile, don't login to any google services from it, then go to youtube and watch some videos on a particular topic. Next time you go to youtube, you will get recommendations based on your previous activity, even though you don't have an account.

Great(?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, but...

Will this incognito mode require a Google account? It seems that every time Google does something privacy-related, it requires a Google account. Want to see what information they have on you? Create a Google account. Want to request they remove said information? Create an account...

Why not just use the browser incognito mode

[thegarbz]

Serious if I was going to search for "How to be a Kinky Furry" on Youtube, why would I even want that in my local browser history? Just use the browser incognito mode. That will isolate it from your account altogether.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[thegarbz]

because I occasionally sit down with my daughter and we search for videos on various topics together.

And how is private browsing not a solution to your use case as well?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

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