Why You Should Clear Your Search/Browse/Order Histories
Imagine yourself hanging out with a few friends, and they tell you about a new frisbee company that you’ve never heard of. On your way home, you’re scrolling through Instagram or on Gmail and all of a sudden you see an add for that exact same product that your friends told you about. Are tech companies spying on us? Are they listening in through the microphones on our phones? How else could this have happened?
The good news is that the major tech companies are likely not listening in on our conversations. The bad news is that they know enough about us that they don’t have to.
What’s Going On?
Whenever you create an account on a site like YouTube, Netflix or Amazon and start to watch videos or browse products, that activity is being stored by default without your consent in a history section of the site. This information is then used to optimize their recommendation systems with the intention of keeping you trapped on their platform for as much time as possible. In YouTube’s case, it is to get you to watch more videos so they can serve more ads, for Amazon, it’s so you will buy more things.
A common argument is as long as you have strong self control that it is possible to overcome the influence of these recommendation algorithms. A big issue with that thought is that it is a single human brain competing against a computer algorithm that is constantly improving at an exponential rate. Even if some people are currently able to resist the influence of these systems, it is almost inevitable that at some point in the near future no one will be able to. Essentially, the more information that huge tech companies have on you, the easier it is for them to keep you locked into their ecosystem.
As of 2018, 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are coming from artificial intelligence driven recommendations. If you read a 2016 paper by Google engineers who designed the YouTube recommendation system, you’ll see how crucial search and watch histories are to them keeping you ensnared for longer periods of time. This quote from the “System Overview” section of this paper is one of many that illustrates this point: “The candidate generation network takes events from the user’s YouTube activity history as input and retrieves a small subset (hundreds) of videos from a large corpus. These candidates are intended to be generally relevant to the user with high precision.” Removing your search and watch history from YouTube is a crucial way to take some power out of the hands of a major company that benefits financially from harvesting your attention.
Solutions
Beyond regularly clearing your history from these platforms, there are other ways to regain some ground in the battle for your attention. There are a few useful Chrome extensions, one completely removes the recommendations from YouTube, and Nudge, an extension with the purpose of adding more friction to the use of many popular sites that are power players in the attention economy.
