YouTube privacy concern

[lundgren]

Hi, hope I chose the right thread (new here). 
I have just moved to London from abroad and rented a new home. We finally got our internet connection sorted a few days ago. Trusted the landlord’s recommendation and went with the same ISP as he had when he was living here (he just moved out prior to us moving in but cancelled his contract so we had to set up a new one). Today my wife got a notification from YouTube (see picture) with a recommended video. She doesn’t use YouTube much but has her own account logged in on her phone. She doesn’t care much about Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson and doesn’t watch any videos with them or search for them. The name on the notification “For you: Farzad” is the first name of our landlord! Any idea how this is possible? Could it just be a location based hiccup from YouTube? Could it be data given through our ISP (as it is the same one as our landlord used-ZEN). She tried clicking the notification and it sent her to the video but she was still logged in to her personal account. Any possible explanation and suggested mitigation is welcome.

[Guest]

It's likely location based. Google seen you are at a new location and probably adjusted it's recommendations based on other data it's collected from around the same location. Could be based on gps data or a general location based on your ip, and no your ip doesn't actually point to your location.

As far as what you can do about it, nothing really other than ignoring it and consuming other content.

[BootlessBuck]

Having the landlord’s username is the strangest part of this. I don’t see how that could be explained based on the location alone, as YouTube users are in the same location as other YouTube users all the time. If I go visit my mom’s house, I shouldn’t start getting notifications targeted at her. At most from a location based notification should be videos about that location… which I would expect would be about London, not 2 people from North America.

 

Is it possible the landlord has a TV (or something) logged into his account, and maybe the mobile app saw those other devices on the network and pulled user/recommendation data from that? Again, still a stupid thing for them to do, due to multi-person households. 

[lundgren]

18 hours ago, undergroundbeef said:

Having the landlord’s username is the strangest part of this. I don’t see how that could be explained based on the location alone, as YouTube users are in the same location as other YouTube users all the time. If I go visit my mom’s house, I shouldn’t start getting notifications targeted at her. At most from a location based notification should be videos about that location… which I would expect would be about London, not 2 people from North America.

 

Is it possible the landlord has a TV (or something) logged into his account, and maybe the mobile app saw those other devices on the network and pulled user/recommendation data from that? Again, still a stupid thing for them to do, due to multi-person households. 

No, not a TV but I realised there is a google nest thermostat that I connected to the new network that I’m unable to use because it is still tied to my landlord’s google account. This might be the reason but it’s still very strange that it would give YouTube suggestions on a completely foreign device…