YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues::Ad blockers are firewalls for our sanity – turning them off is madness

  • Bri Guy @sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Google in general doesn’t give a flying fuck about your privacy

    EDIT: actually, they do care so much about it being shared with them :P

    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yep, it is one of the main reasons I have been switching away from Google products. Proton Mail for email, for example. I have no desire to give Google every detail of what I do online.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google was founded to sell your private data for money to pay for services you want. It’s just taken them 15 years to become big enough that their stock holders demand more money than a couple of 5 second ads per video.

    They’ll squeeze a couple more bucks out of ads, then they’ll squeeze a couple more out of premium, but not enough people will go past that. They can’t keep pulling profit out of thin air for wall streets demand for perpetual increase.

    Sooner or later some of the following will have to happen:

    Mandatory login to watch

    Users/Content providers pay a premium for quality

    Content providers pay for storage

    New or low rated content providers pay for hosting until they reach minimum subscribers.

    Premium gets unskippable 5 second ads.

    No embedding off site.

  • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    [Company] cares more about its shareholders and profits more than [the environment, safety, its employees or customers, the economy, etc.] Not sure why this would be a revelation to anyone.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Well, caring less for your privacy means more revenue for them, so yes.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of “you freeloading scum.”

    The reason YouTube has been dabbling with its own “Unblock Or Eff Off” strategy instead of bringing down the universal banhammer is that it knows how much it will upset the balance of the ecosystem.

    Google has revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars, while publishers struggle to survive, and users have to wear a metaphorical hazmat suit to stay sane.

    The pre-internet days saw advertising directly support publishers who knew how to attract the right audiences who would respond well to the right adverts.

    YouTube’s business model is a microcosm of the bigger ad tech world, where it basically needs to spam millions to generate enough results for its advertisers.

    Of course, this wouldn’t provide the revenues to YouTube or the ad tech business obtainable by being spammy counterfeits of responsible companies with a lock on the market.


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