YouTube Will Soon Use Your Personal Data to Show Ads Based on What You Do Outside of YouTube – | Cord Cutters News

By
Luke Bouma
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in
Google has begun notifying millions of users that an old technical quirk allowing them to block personalized ads on YouTube—while keeping personalization active everywhere else on Google—is being eliminated. Starting in the coming weeks, the company will override the legacy YouTube-specific setting and make My Ad Center the single source of truth for ad personalization across all Google services, including YouTube.
The change closes what amounted to an accidental privacy loophole that persisted for years on certain older Google accounts. In the past, some users discovered they could turn off personalized ads exclusively on YouTube through a now-obsolete toggle, even though they had personalization enabled in their main Google account settings. That separate YouTube toggle, described by the company as redundant and outdated, will no longer function independently. Once the update rolls out, the state of personalized ads on YouTube will mirror whatever the user has chosen in My Ad Center.
The shift means that anyone who currently enjoys non-personalized ads on YouTube—despite having personalization turned on for Search, Gmail, Maps, and the Google Play Store—will begin seeing tailored advertising on the video platform unless they explicitly disable personalization in My Ad Center. Conversely, users who had turned personalization off globally will continue to see only generic ads on YouTube as well.
Google emphasized that the move is intended to simplify and unify ad controls rather than force personalization on unwilling users. My Ad Center remains the centralized dashboard where individuals can turn personalization on or off for all Google products with one switch, fine-tune sensitive ad categories, or block specific advertisers entirely. The company also reiterated that subscribers to YouTube Premium and YouTube Premium Lite are unaffected, retaining their ad-free or reduced-ad experience regardless of personalization settings.
Privacy advocates have long criticized the fragmented nature of Google’s previous ad controls, arguing that hidden or hard-to-find toggles made genuine user choice difficult. Some welcomed the consolidation as a step toward transparency, while others expressed concern that the default behavior will now lean toward personalization for a segment of users who had deliberately opted out on YouTube alone.
The rollout is gradual and limited to accounts that still carried the legacy YouTube setting. Users who never encountered the old toggle—or who already manage everything through My Ad Center—will notice no difference. Affected individuals began receiving email and in-product notifications this week explaining the upcoming alignment and directing them to My Ad Center to review or adjust their preferences.
With YouTube remaining the world’s largest video platform and one of Google’s most lucrative advertising properties, any adjustment to how ads are targeted draws immediate attention. The company maintains that unifying the experience reduces confusion and ensures settings behave consistently whether someone is watching videos, checking email, or using navigation.
For now, the only action required from most users is none at all—unless they specifically want to keep personalized ads off YouTube. In that case, a quick visit to My Ad Center will lock in their preference across every Google surface, ending years of fragmented controls once and for all.
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