So where is the front end I can use to still give YouTube ad views without being tracked? I’m saying this as a YT premium subscriber.
sums it up.
a long time believer of seeing ads here. that way, i don't have to subscribe to bazillion of platforms i tend to visit. but this view started to shift when i started seeing ads from my alma mater's football team everywhere. the "why am i seeing this ad" link told me that "i gave my information to the advertiser".
of course i did, i went to school there!
I think I agree that it probably wouldn't exist. Not very many companies would invest that much to just to break even.
I wouldn’t mind being manipulated into buying a clunky life improvement gadget that I use exactly once as much as being forced to watch a guy screaming at me for 15 seconds. On second thought, isn’t the latter straight up jumpscare?
You can completely, 100% opt out of personalized ads. Go to https://adssettings.google.com/ (edit to fix url)
Well there was of course; the do-not-track header.
So now we fight back with ad-blockers and other privacy preserving tricks (like clearing cookies) to keep our sanity and make our compiled profiles a lot less valuable (although Google will probably still profit from it by pretending I do see ads and are influenced).
When you have data on one person, you can sell them ads. When you have data on everybody, you can change elections, culture, and widespread opinions as you see fit. Even if that isn't being abused today (which it probably is) the fact the Google has the capability of doing that one day is scary enough that we absolutely shouldn't let the practice continue.
As for me, I'll stick to youtube-dl
The problem with that logic is that people don't just hate ads, they hate and/or distrust Google.
People are not going to give money to a company they hate and/or distrust if they can avoid it. That's why it's important for businesses to not engage in unethical behavior/things their customers hate.
Of course, in Google's case (and peers), they're largely immune to market forces thanks to years of anti-competitive behavior. So the consequences of being evil/unethical/shitty/etc are usually minor or non-existent.
That's exactly why projects like this are good. Because it's the only way (a tiny subset of) consumers have (a negligible amount of) power to have an impact on bad business practices, since the usual "vote with your wallet" tactic doesn't work.
And if creators lose ad revenue because people use a project like this, well, tough luck. In the short term, some of those might make less money or go out of business, but if this ends up changing (or bankrupting!) youtube, it will ultimately help creators in the long run if it means new business opportunities once the monopoly is gone and/or some of that bargaining power goes back to the consumers.
IRL dumping is illegal, arguably we are in a similar situation.
These alternative frontends at least avoid part of the tracking (ads are already taken care of by uBlock Origin anyway) and the non-free Javascript code. With respect to the business model, I don't feel especially guilty, Google has way too much money and power and I'd rather have an unsustainable YouTube replaced by a federation of PeerTube instances with a power diluted across these instances.
These alternative frontends could be seen as a temporary, partial solution while YouTube is up.
On the technical side, they are way easier on underpowered devices than YouTube proper, including the PinePhone.
I've never heard of anyone being reimbursed by a website that unwittingly infected them. Websites that take responsibility for their ads, that's different. But those are very few and very far between.
Right now, surfing without an adblocker is like going to a swinger party vowing not to use condoms. (Actually, I think your browser is already intimite with more domains upon one average visit to one average website than that...)
So: block ads. It's basic Internet hygiene.
I only wish Gmail gave me the option to do this.
That's why I pay Fastmail: no ads, and no data harvesting.
It is a good time to have a commercial relationship with an email service. Less likely for politics to get involved.
https://workspace.google.com/individual/
Not sure if it's fully launched yet.
You do need a domain for Business Starter, but that cost would be less than the savings over the Individual plan.
Individual is a "normal" Google account and doesn't increase your storage from the default 15GB or support custom domains. But if you stop paying you still have a valid @gmail account and just lose access to the additional features.
"Business Starter" uses your own domain..."Custom email with your domain". So, yes, you would need to export the emails, but you retain your email address.
I did, and when Gmail turned off my billing (for my own protection), I lost the ability to send and receive emails, because I was exceeding my drive quota by 1,200%.
I have to send them a passport photo (my ID is expired) and hope that they bless me with the ability to pay for additional storage again. But I realized it’s safer not to pay for anything.
Google workspace individual seems like a different thing. Kinda confusing to be honest.
This only removes the ads inserted by YouTube. Nowadays even moderately successful you tubers are inserting their own ads into their videos. This will not be skipped using youtube red.
Same is true of digital newspapers, magazines, etc., the subscription fees are way out of proportion to what they made from ads per reader in print or made in CPM online.
While this might not matter for one publisher, it prevents users from accepting pay-for-use as an alternative model across the range of media they consume unless through an aggregate subscription like the one acquired by Apple.
(While on the subject, the various ad-free streaming providers litter the offerings with more and more ads to the point you can’t trust your shows will indeed be ad free. It’s hard to say if this is on purpose to undermine and kill that model or not.)
I would add that if you hate advertisements, you can pay for YouTube Red or whatever they call it, and remove them. I think that's a good compromise: either you use it for free with ads, or you pay to remove them.