[curiouscats]

I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.

I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.

I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.

I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.

I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).

[drakythe]

How does subscribing increase their spying? Beyond the obvious that they now have your billing address.

[kenhwang]

You can watch Youtube incognito for free but you need to login to benefit from subscribing.

[getoffmyyawn]

I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.

Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.

[mertd]

You can delete your watch history after every session or have something automated do it for you. That will work fine if you only want to watch the content you subscribed to.

If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".

[kenhwang]

You'd have to assume history is actually deleted and not just simply hidden from the user. Pretty high bar to pass given it's Google.

I personally don't care for better recommendations. I just need a functional subscription/notification system and much much better search.

[Sebb767]

You'd also have to trust that YT doesn't track you in the incognito window, given that it's still pretty easy to identify an user and you're also most likely using Google's own browser to hide.

If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.

[throwaway2990]

Lol how cute people think deleting watch history has any real effect.

[kaelin]

Also cute these people think using incognito does anything to stop Google from tying the traffic back to them. They already finger print you off hundreds of parameters. Hell most people are literally using their web browser.