This has happened to me several times now, and at first, I dismissed it as mere coincidence. But slowly, and with growing certainty, I’ve started to believe it’s not accidental—it’s intentional.

Over the past 2–3 years, I’ve developed a habit: whenever I want to search for something on YouTube or watch content outside my main areas of interest, I switch to incognito mode. This is my way of keeping my main feed clean and relevant to my preferences.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed something unsettling. Occasionally, a video I watched in incognito mode would inexplicably show up in my main feed. At first, I was confused. Then it started happening more often—videos I had never clicked on but were clearly related to the genre I had explored in incognito mode would surface in my recommendations. Naturally, I avoided engaging with them, but the pattern was unmistakable.

Up to this point, I felt uneasy about YouTube’s recommendation system, but what pushed me to write about this was something even more alarming. Recently, YouTube started recommending videos I had watched in entirely different browsers—Samsung Internet on my phone and Firefox/Opera on my PC—while I wasn’t logged in to my account.

I understand that Google Chrome tracks users even in incognito mode [1], but discovering that YouTube tracks behavior across different browsers, operating systems, and sessions, without being logged in, feels downright invasive. It’s mind-boggling and deeply concerning.

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1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/going-incognito-in-chrome-doesnt-mean-youre-not-being-tracked-now-confirmed-by-google