this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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old google accounts that have been regularly used for their entire existence are whitelisted by youtube's age assurance, because if the google account is beyond like...10 years old and has been getting continuous use the entire time then there's no way it belongs to a kid anymore
that's why I kind of regret deleting my older Gmail addresses, the one I use to watch youtube is still pretty old over 15 years. but I had one google account that would be 19 years old by now
mine is that old and i rue the day i became so dependent on it; so i suppose it's a good thing that i can't tell exactly when that happened. lol
so compartmentalize it for just watching youtube. make a new profile on your privacy-friendly web browser just for that, load that profile up with all the annoyance blocking things you need and leave the main daily-driver profile free from google.
and don't use any of google's services on mobile if you can
i've already done the browser stuff you recommended leveraging container tabs on firefox.
but it doesn't seem matter: i recently discovered a facebook account that i forgotten i had created 15ish years ago tied to a secondary gmail account that i don't use anywhere besides firefox in private mode a dozen or so times per year at the most on a vpn. while using that facebook account, i got an event reminder for a party that i bought a ticket to a few weeks back using my somewhat recently created proton email address along with an almost equally recent debit card & bank account that i opened a few months ago.
it makes me think that server side tracking is now more effective than anything you can do at your end.
Wait, what is the age assurance thing? I thought just logging in was enough to make all age gates disappear, I didn't realize there was anything special about my account (other than it being tied to my personal email instead of a Gmail address).
a few months ago, youtube implemented AI-based age assurance where to prove you're an adult if the AI thought you were underage, you could either
The media is evil and didn't give the story any attention
What the fuck, how is this the first time I'm hearing about this... I was thinking of deleting my account (with no phone or ID tied to it), I guess I'm keeping it for now.