It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.
This is a big reason I view the new “we’ll automatically delete your data!” Crap as disingenuous at best. They’ve already learned everything from the data in a few hours, it’s useless after that anyhow.
A big problem with data is not the company itself using it, but other ways it can come back to bite you.
E.g. a sexual photo retrieved from a private social media album is no threat to your reputation when it’s been assumed into some machine learning model for detecting sexual photos, but it’s certainly a threat if a future data leak allows your enemies to get the actual .PNG or .JPG and send it to the news media or your loved ones. Knowing that the photo can actually be deleted is valuable in this case and I’m sure there are many other similar ones that could be listed.
Users want to delete watch history, which they can. Classifier models predicting what you want to watch are not the video watch history, nor are the models capable of producing it.
> Classifier models predicting what you want to watch
But that probably is not the only model generated from your data, is it? They probably have many other models generated from your data, everything from ad-displaying models to profiling models for Hydra.
That's what I'm talking about. Think of the recommender model as your own personal neural net that is trained, over time, to show you videos it thinks you might like. It is not capable of telling you which videos you watched, because it is not a database or list of watched videos, but it is instead a classifier that predicts what you probably want to watch.
