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How to remove youtube's recall of my usage



 
 
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  #1  
Old February 20th 19, 07:50 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Private
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1
Default How to remove youtube's recall of my usage

4 months ago I had mice in my house so i looked up mouse removal on
youtube. I must mention that mice are my greatest fear in life. I
regularly have nightmares about them. All I wanted were some videos to
help me remove them from my home, because I was living in my van at the
time since I refused to be in my house with mice inside
Likie I said, that was 4 months ago. The mice were killed (by an
exterminator). I have moved back in my house and the exterminator closed
up the holes where they entered.

I want to forget this horror, but I cant, because constantly puts video
suggestions on my screen, with pictures of mice. This very much upsets
me.

I have a laptop, use public wifi, (no home internet). I DO NOT have a
subscription to youtube. I use XP with Firefox. I have removed all
cache, cookies, and cleared all firefox history. How in the hell does
youtube know my user history? Do I need to reinstall firefox, or what...
To me this is extreme harassment. Just seeing a picture of a mouse makes
me nauseous.

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  #2  
Old February 20th 19, 09:22 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default How to remove youtube's recall of my usage

Private wrote:
4 months ago I had mice in my house so i looked up mouse removal on
youtube. I must mention that mice are my greatest fear in life. I
regularly have nightmares about them. All I wanted were some videos to
help me remove them from my home, because I was living in my van at the
time since I refused to be in my house with mice inside
Likie I said, that was 4 months ago. The mice were killed (by an
exterminator). I have moved back in my house and the exterminator closed
up the holes where they entered.

I want to forget this horror, but I cant, because constantly puts video
suggestions on my screen, with pictures of mice. This very much upsets
me.

I have a laptop, use public wifi, (no home internet). I DO NOT have a
subscription to youtube. I use XP with Firefox. I have removed all
cache, cookies, and cleared all firefox history. How in the hell does
youtube know my user history? Do I need to reinstall firefox, or what...
To me this is extreme harassment. Just seeing a picture of a mouse makes
me nauseous.


Let me guess. You have a GMail account and...

Youtube is owned by Google. Google considers one of their accounts
to be "one account for everything".

Just about every web page has Google Adsense on it, meaning
there are lots of opportunities for tracking.

I would say every time you log into GMail, Google associates
your "mice problem" on the account, with future references to
that cookie. The cookie might be around to the end of the
day until you clean it.

I would try cleaning again, then *without* using GMail or
*using the browser that you have configured to check GMail
a hundred times a day* being in operation, check on some
other browser whether you have mice.

*******

Bleachbit is a package that cleans stuff. I *never* install this
or use it. But, I look at the source code for inspiration.

https://gist.github.com/BrunoReX/5286414

firefox.xml

In this stanza, you can see some paths with forward slashes. That means
the first two lines are for cleaning a Linux Firefox profile. The second
two lines use backslashes and that makes the second lines the ones
used by Windows.

action command="delete" path="~/.mozilla/firefox*/*/formhistory.sqlite"/
action command="delete" path="~/.mozilla/firefox*/*/formhistory.dat"/
action command="delete" path="$APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*\formhist ory.sqlite"/
action command="delete" path="$APPDATA\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*\formhist ory.dat"/

I don't generally approve of deleting .sqlite files. It's not
because I'm a prude or something. The sqlite files in Firefox are
"cross-linked". Which means entry number one in "places.sqlite"
could also be entry number one in "formhistory.sqlite". When you
go around blowing away a couple random files, it's like blowing
the arms off and leaving stuff all over the place.

On balance though, it's my opinion that the .sqlite isn't necessarily
the worst stuff in there.

Since you're using WinXP, your Firefox can't go past 52ESR. You
could look and see if the SQLite Editor plugin is still available.
As a plugin, it would be more likely to deal with entries in
a unified way. Maybe deleting an item, causes writes to two .sqlite
files.

Of more concern in Firefox, would be DOM storage. See if there
are any folders with "+++" in the name. Those could be DOM storage.

Some of the lines in the firefox.xml involve subroutines. For example,
a reference to "sqlite.vacuum", probably involves having a copy of
sqlite3.exe in the package, and doing something like

sqlite3.exe places.sqlite .vacuum

And vacuuming doesn't really add any value to the cleaning exercise,
so you don't even need to research that one. Vacuuming might be
necessary if you were removing incriminating evidence before the
Feds kick down your door. But for preventing "mice references", it
would be totally unnecessary. Some people consider using the
..vacuum command to be risky.

What I'm illustrating here, is an approach to doing the research.
I'm not really crazy about letting BleachBit loose on its own.
I don't trust any sort of "automated deletion", because there
are more unskilled script writers out there than skilled ones.
And maybe you'd be the guy to discover a corner case they hadn't
thought of.

In any case:

1) I think your "leak" is logging into Gmail. All that
cleaning effort was for nothing when you did that.

2) Yes, you can clean a browser. But the browsers vary in
how complex they are to clean. I'm completely out of my league
on Chrome. Chrome has way too many databases. For Firefox, I
would recommend tracking down the "schema diagram" which draws
arrows between .sqlite files. That will explain which .sqlite
files are "loners" and can be deleted willy-nilly.

If you can find an Sqlite Manager plugin (pre 52ESR), then
that could be used to work on the contents of SQlite.

Seamonkey actually has a Cookie Manager builtin, which
allows deleting cookies. I don't know if Firefox has one
of those. The Seamonkey Cookie Manager does not support
"global select", like ctrl A, so you have to delete the
stinking cookies *one at a time*. And you know they designed
it like that on purpose, to prevent *you* from quickly
achieving an objective.

3) You might benefit from cleaning DOM storage. Try looking
for folders with +++ in the name. And delete those.

4) There could also be a "webappsstore.sqlite", which seems to
grow on Seamonkey, and I've been deleting that file. It almost
looks to me to be more DOM storage. You'll have to watch the
one on Firefox and see if it's "way bigger than 64K" before
deleting it. I don't think that one is cross-linked.

But at least give the GMail theory a try. Disconnect from GMail,
shut down Firefox, clean, start up Firefox without doing any GMail,
test Youtube, look for mice.

If that doesn't work, track down a more recent version
of "BleachBit firefox.xml". The example above is from 2015.

Or, have a play with this. Apparently it would run in
some 52ESR or older Firefox. It's not the WebExtension version.
I'm not saying you'll be happy with this. But it's better
than nothing.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us...qlite-manager/

I've also looked through sqlite files by hand, using

sqlite3.exe places.sqlite .dump places.txt
notepad places.txt

and that gives you a file which can "re-manufacture"
the places.sqlite file. Editing that text file, in principle,
would be the equivalent of sqlite manager. However, if entries
are numbered, you then have to look in all the other sqlite text
files you created, to zap the equivalent entry (if they're
cross-linked). I've never actually attempted to do full-on
edits that way, but I did have a look around with Notepad.

Even without looking at every line in the file, you can
see lines that are "History", lines that are "remembered Downloads"
and so on. The structure will be quite apparent.

Paul
  #3  
Old February 20th 19, 10:40 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default How to remove youtube's recall of my usage

Private wrote:

4 months ago I had mice in my house so i looked up mouse removal on
youtube. I must mention that mice are my greatest fear in life. I
regularly have nightmares about them. All I wanted were some videos to
help me remove them from my home, because I was living in my van at the
time since I refused to be in my house with mice inside
Likie I said, that was 4 months ago. The mice were killed (by an
exterminator). I have moved back in my house and the exterminator closed
up the holes where they entered.

I want to forget this horror, but I cant, because constantly puts video
suggestions on my screen, with pictures of mice. This very much upsets
me.

I have a laptop, use public wifi, (no home internet). I DO NOT have a
subscription to youtube. I use XP with Firefox. I have removed all
cache, cookies, and cleared all firefox history. How in the hell does
youtube know my user history? Do I need to reinstall firefox, or what...
To me this is extreme harassment. Just seeing a picture of a mouse makes
me nauseous.


So, have you gone into your Google account to delete your history?
Google account - Data & personalization. Besides Youtube search
history, you might want to disable the other history data types.

Do you have Firefox configured to purge everything on its exit (cookies,
site preferences, history, etc)? When you visit any Google site,
including Youtube, and if you let Firefox save site login credentials,
do you accept the login credentials for the site when Firefox presents
you with them pre-filled in the login input text boxes in the web page?


  #4  
Old February 20th 19, 09:06 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
rabit
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3
Default How to remove youtube's recall of my usage

On 02/19/2019 10:50 PM, Private wrote:
4 months ago I had mice in my house so i looked up mouse removal on
youtube. I must mention that mice are my greatest fear in life. I
regularly have nightmares about them. All I wanted were some videos
to help me remove them from my home, because I was living in my van
at the time since I refused to be in my house with mice inside Likie
I said, that was 4 months ago. The mice were killed (by an
exterminator). I have moved back in my house and the exterminator
closed up the holes where they entered.

I want to forget this horror, but I cant, because constantly puts
video suggestions on my screen, with pictures of mice. This very much
upsets me.


Yeah, I wish XFCE had some logo other than a crummy mouse.

A few years ago my Logitech M525, favorite computer mouse ever, had its
scrollwheel's rubber "tire" chewed up by a mouse.

I use a Havahart trap, and another smaller plastic Smart Mouse Trap, to
catch them, and I release them a few miles down the road.
 




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