[outsidetheparty]

I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of dark patterns involved in turning these settings off:

https://myactivity.google.com/u/1/activitycontrols

Disabling a setting asks if you also want to delete your history for that setting; if you say yes it shows a sample of what you're deleting, you confirm it, and it's done. Nothing tried to encourage me to stick around, keep my data, they could easily have let me turn off collection of new data but not mentioned that they still have the existing data around -- I expected trickery but found none.

(Except for one small detail: I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place; the support update we're discussing contains a link to it, but I can't find it anywhere in the YouTube preferences or advanced settings or anywhere else.)

(Oh, and it had no visible effect on my YouTube home screen, I'm not seeing the empty page I hoped for, just the same garbage videos it usually prompts me with for no clear reason. So there's that too.)

[jsnell]

> I can't figure out how one is supposed to discover that this page exists in the first place

Click on "History" in the YouTube sidebar. It'll take you to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history. Not only does it shows the watch history, it has embedded controls for clearing the entire history, deleting individual entries, turning off new collection, as well as links to the more granular activity control pages.

[outsidetheparty]

You're absolutely right, thank you. I was so hung up on "preferences" or "settings" being the place to look that I missed the link that was literally named the thing I was looking for!

[bensecure]

If you open your google account settings, the very first section is labelled "privacy and personalization". If you click on that, the option to disable youtube watch history shows up. In terms of "dark patterns", they do have a nag prompt begging you to reenable watch history which shows up in the recommended videos section of a youtube video. The only way to disable this nag permanently is seemingly to block it with uB0.

[outsidetheparty]

Yep, I was looking in YouTube settings instead. I wouldn't have thought to leave YouTube to change a setting that affects YouTube, but it's a reasonable-in-hindsight design decision to collect all the privacy stuff for various google apps in one place.

[summerlight]

AFAIK, this "My Activity" page is controlled by the user trust team which is mostly independent from other products, hence it doesn't share much incentives to "optimize" metrics.