YouTube will start using your view history to guess if you're an adult

My account is old enough to buy beer. The fuck do you think, YouTube?

My YouTube account is old enough to be an adult.

Mine is literally older than YouTube.

Will start?

I'm pretty certain that they're already guessing as much about you as possible for targeted ads.

I watched a video today on my work computer for the first time, where I don’t have the ability to block the ads. Dear god. The litany of overhyped, lie-based AI dreck was traumatizing.
- I watched a single motorcycle video on computer logged out of YouTube. All the related videos were rage bait right wing content. None related to motorcycles.

YouTube thinks I'll buy a Rolex LMFAO

YouTube has started showing me ads for planning my own funeral 😞

I get ads to become a nuclear engineer and work on a military submarine 😂
- Aww, YouTube thinks you're smart! And short.
It’s always a good time. Wirh these things you never know.

Why does YouTube need to know how old I am, explicit content isn't allowed on the platform so the age of the viewer isn't something they need to know.

Because they need to know who to target ads for gutter cleaning systems and fat man t-shirts.
- Oh right yt has ads. I keep forgetting.

So, if you're a child, watch some videos about budgeting, maybe a few cooking videos?

I dunno, what are some categories of video no youth would ever watch?

Vanlife videos, cooking shows, and politics should make YouTube believe you're an adult. But hell I subscribe to gaming channels, with watching gamers play games. Will that get me labeled a child.
- It's interesting that you mention the gaming thing, I've realised recently that I'm still watching the same folks I was 10 years ago, so it's really content by millennials for millennials - not a child thing like I'm used to assuming. It does come in part because if I mention YouTube to a younger person I get a blank look when I say who I watch.
How to season your cast iron pan.
I think you got it backwards. What are some categories an adult would never watch? Fucking Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues and the like. Although it's very likely they just play it from their account for their kids.
- I regularly watch kids shows in Korean. Not because I'm a Korean baby, but because it's a lower level vocabulary to learn the language
- You do realize that there are a ton of adult fans for kids shows and games right? How quickly the bronies are forgotten with everything happening in the world.
- Your last sentence scuttled the point of your first two sentences.
IT certification training videos.
Watch videos about planning your retirement, listen to some classical music and the Beatles. Finish the session off by searching for arthritis
- Finish the session off by searching for arthritis
  Found it!
Recorded really early 20th century movies or acts.
- Disney before Frozen came out.
- Listen to some classical music
They’re looking for people under 13 I assume.
In other words, I think that’s the diving line. So I don’t think 12 year olds are budgeting.
- Makes sense, as all services I've encountered that mention age in regards to data collecting imply that it's illegal to harvest those under 13. Mobile games and other services would not harvest data if you state your age as well below 13, but the increasingly vast majority just say "we will be harvesting you; by clicking this button or making an account you confirm that you are over 13 years of age.." Because, you know, real child protection laws are in effect.
I dunno, what are some categories of video no youth would ever watch?
news?
- some scifi shows in the early 2000s.
Maybe some finance, home repair, defense economics.

Well that's gonna be interesting since the TV runs on my account but 99.9% of the time it's my kids watching...

They'll actually outright ban you if you've ever watched any DannyGo!

My viewing history can legally drink in US in a year. What do you mean „guess”?

Are you sure you are not three kids in a trench coat?
- I just got off work at the business factory. I did three businesses today!

lol, many adults will get flagged as kids:

you keep clicking on YT Shots
watching Joe Rogan again? sus

Was gonna say.. my kids keep accidentally using my profile to watch their videos. YouTube is going to think I'm a teen/child with peak gen alpha brain rot.
Ben Shapiro fans in shambles
- either him or charlie kirk.
Me watching Pokémon episodes in YT

Finally, I can just watch 50 hours of N64 emulation nerd shit to gain access to the softcore porn I also wanted to watch, after this next N64 video

Kaze is a god

It's obvious they are going to use it to stop allowing access without a login or disabling history tracking

so just turn off your youtube view and search history

Hopefully Google doesn't bypass that and record your history to guess your age regardless.
In fact, Google probably still records your view and search history even if you turn those off, and turning off view and search history probably just blocks it from getting added to the recommendation algorithm.
Basically, the best course of action, while it still is a course of action, is to just watch YT either on one of the few Invidious instances left standing, or on Grayjay, but still, purge your search and view history and disable it moving forward for added peace of mind if anything.
Better yet would be to straight-up log out of YT on your browser and only watch YT in Invidious or logged in on Grayjay moving forward.

As far as YouTube is concerned, I haven't watched a video there in over a year.

Viewing mostly adult videos? Flagged as a kid exploring sexuality.

Viewing mostly videos with kids? Flagged as an adult with paedo tendencies.

This will probably not work.

So I just have to gain a brain rot addiction to regain my youth? When asked how this twelve year old managed to create a YouTube account 20 years ago, YouTube replied, "he's very clever."

"will start"

Ya know, I'm starting to think Google uses our data for doing more than providing the service that we sign up for.. 🤔
- I still find it hard to believe just how few people even ask themselves the obvious : Provides services 'for free', but is one of the world's biggest companies. Where is the money coming from ?
- No... That cannot be true, considering how rich the company is, so no, your statement must be incorrect according to my analytics. /s
- they are collecting data points and creating a brain for ai to live in

I watch a lot of Bluey...

Good fuckin luck, I'm still getting Spanish ads for womans deodorant. If they can't figure out my sex and language age might be a bit rough for em

Spanish ads for womans deodorant.
Google's data-mining software knew pretty well who 1D10 was. It had simply concluded, based on its extensive database spanning vast numbers of users around the world, that he would look magnificent in a flamenco dress.
- Ok so it's sometimes right.

So watching a Australian man review mp3 players will mean what?

I like how people are proud of having 20 yo viewing history on YT. Send your browsing history to Google as well, see how impressed they are.

There's a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there's a much bigger part that doesn't want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those "I've become my dad" moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who's ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I'm giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

Honestly if they can verify that i'm an adult based on what i watch and stop blocking videos because they might not be appropriate for a kid like mf i ain't no kid.

There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their "adult" accounts. YouTube's detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what's being watched.
The second one is a "damned either way" kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you're an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they're storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.
I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent "user is an adult" flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, "forget" option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube's advertising algorithm just fine).
- I know for a fact that the algorithm retains data about your viewing preferences even after deleting watch history. After deleting mine it would still occasionally recommend something I've seen before and can pretty easily corral me back into whatever direction I had previously gone in. After having done this many times the videos became more random, so I think it keeps a few data points to "jump start" your viewing experience but they gradually change. If you reset your history and view as many random new videos as you can, rinse and repeat, they eventually use those those as starting points.
Googles knows a LOT more about you than what you watch on YouTube.
- Yea and they will know a lot more soon since i will buy the samsung project moohan VR headset that runs android XR. Google will become my eyes with the passthrough and they advertise the headset for AI use that can see everything i see... i'm not sure if i will turn that off right away or try to use it for some stuff. Right now i'm using a meta quest pro to work and do a lot of daily stuff so it's a question of meta or google for me and i decided to get out of meta's not so great VR hardware.
And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity... Sir/Ma'am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

Probably possible to have something like a Selenium or whatever the kids use to automate Web browsers these days Python script that automatically builds a credible viewing history that looks like an adult's.

Hopefully my frequent playing of 90s music playlists works out!

I play a game from 1999, I guess I'm safe

Maybe, maybe not. I recently watched a mini-documentary featuring N64 Tetris tournaments at CTWC (The First Perfect Game of Tetris Just Happened) - this story is of a professional Tetris player who "beat" the game in 2023, aged 13.

I can’t tell if this is worse for bronies or MLP loving children.

Either way, I expect something newsworthy to come from this.

Judging by the comments here I'm getting the impression that people would like to rather provide a selfie or ID.

Can't we just stick to pinky swearing that I'm an adult?

RIP to those of us with kids