I meant to say, not directly use their services for video and definitely aim to give them less identifiable information. Like Invidious’s Yewtu.be (https://yewtu.be/) scrapes YouTube and is not reliant on their API (but does give IP addresses to YouTube, hence the use of a VPN), but FreeTube uses YouTube’s API by default I think, but can use Invidious’s scrapping API (https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/privacy/). PeerTube is not reliant on YouTube at all and can be a good alternative even though it may have fewer videos (since you use that, then you’ve basically degoogled in that case). Maybe once a month or less I will watch a video from any of those services, so I don’t ever subscribe to any channels. I prefer to read documentation rather over watching videos when possible. To me that is in the spirit of degoogling. Same as I don’t avoid every website that has some script of Google under the hood. But I do block their trackers by activating “No Google” (https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google) from time to time if it doesn’t break a website (some website I need to access for work might not load if I have that on) and DuckDuckGo onionized on Tor mostly. I also need to use AlpaFold for work, but fortunately we have an instance that doesn’t go to Google’s servers. They created the protein folding technology and the instance and scripts had to be downloaded at some point from their servers. Degoogling is a fairly complex today. I have been reading more and more about digital cooperativism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative) and even though something may be open source, as expected, companies can still profit off of it. From the sounds of it, when it comes to cooperativism, no one person controls everything or profits. You may know more about this any how. All that said, giving people more digital privacy and protection is not a technological issue, but more of social issue. Hopefully people get more informed and interested in their digital rights in the future and society moves away from the likes of Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple (and OpenAI) at large.
EliteCloneMike
If I have a project, I often prefer to read up on how to accomplish the task, such as going to blog posts or getting to the source documentation. If that is not possible, I use yewtu.be (it can be slow to load just FYI). There is also PeerTube, but it doesn’t have as much content. Lastly, there is FreeTube, which is built on YouTubes API and gives them revenue in some way, but doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t allow Google to learn your behavior or target you for ads. I also use a VPN (with DNS protection enabled) when loading anything. If you’re degoogling (as I and many have done), one other item I hear people say they have difficulty dropping is Google Maps. I know you didn’t ask about it, but just to add, other options exist, such as Open Street Maps (OSM), Organic Maps, CoMaps, Magic Earth (I think may be built on Google Maps API, but not entirely sure), and Kagi (I’m fairly sure it uses Apple Maps and Google Maps API). Also, I have just started looking into FlockHopper, but I’m not sure what it is built on, I think OSM and MapBox (not sure if I have that right), but I’m not sure. Also MapQuest still exists.
Not terribly interested in this video platform as I also don’t use YouTube. I really hope Google gets broken up and I don’t like them harvesting my data and selling it to the US Government any more than I like companies like Bytedance selling my data to the Chinese Government. I am in the US and think we should have established data privacy and data protection laws long before things got to the point they have gotten too.
Sounds like a desperate attempt to convince investors that there is growing user engagement by decreasing the amount of time needed for a video to be considered engaging. Must be that people are moving through shorts at breakneck speeds. I haven’t touched YouTube in many years as the platform turned into one giant ad service (even if you pay for to remove ads). I guess that is what Google is primarily anyway, a company aiming to serve personalized (maybe also behavioral) ad to people.
Been using DDG for years now, and have since turned off AI. My only issue with DDG, StartPage, and Ecosia, is that they don’t do their own indexing (AFAIK). I still use them, but have been looking into Kagi and Brave (I know they have their own issues as well) as I think they index independently of Google or Microsoft. With not having an independent index, then the search engine is at the mercy of the companies that do. Such as is Google wants to remove or deprioritize something, it would also be seen in StartPage. Again, that my understanding and it may be wrong.
Also, (maybe some would argue first) might be that someone goes to prison over a thing like this.
For the betterment of the shareholders. :/
Edit: But seriously, what do they mean by “better”? Maybe there was potential and still is to educate people and improve critical thinking skills to assess what they are being fed instead of blindly trusting algorithmic output. Thats more of a fundamental issue than the algorithms though.
I am very interested in this topic and have not heard of cooperativism until today applied to digital entities. I am very much for this idea to take hold or other ideas that can allow for shared earnings and things like data protection. Not sure if this would also potentially include data privacy or not. I think these things are great, but laws also need to be established to protect workers rights in the information age and same goes for data protection and data privacy.
Same. After the NYT articles (and several others from other news agencies), I stopped using Google for storage of personal files as I no longer trust their AI. Private (technically they call them personal) files should not be analyzed, unless there is a very high level of necessity. Scanning around the clock should not be done, just like we don’t need cameras in every home because bad things happen in homes. I also get that people will say make backups and that the cloud is optional. But an email address itself can be vital and is unable to be backed up (as far as I’m aware you can only back up the emails themselves). I doubt they are doing any better than if they just reported accounts at random. I mean reporting millions of accounts a year will probably catch some bad actors. And that they lock you out of all other data and won’t give your account back even after you are proven innocent is beyond insane. I don’t necessarily even think that emails should be scanned either. I get anything that is (or is about to be) made public needs to be scrutinized. Just my two cents.
Edit: Google claims humans are in the reviewing the accounts, but you also have to ask what conditions those people are under. Are they highly trained? Are they looking at the worst of the worst every day? Are they pressured to just follow the recommendations of the AI? Or are they just trusting the AI and rubber stamping the results? Do they just pass the buck? I don’t think the current system was ever ment to handle the volume of accusations spurred on by AI. Google and Meta are at the forefront, but it’s the NCMEC that is the one really pushing for more volume.
This is a failure of the courts. But I agree that tools like chat control or using AI to find child abuse (as has been inappropriately used by Google and Meta to falsely accuse people of such crimes) should not be the norm. I blame NCMEC for that and a lot of the current situation. That organization just wants to have numbers of reports go up year after year to secure funding. They also want to get rid of all adult content. So now we end up with situations where unshared innocent family photos and legal adult content get reported. Which reporting itself is not an issue, but then what follows where innocent people are often never given their account data back is an issue. It sometimes takes multiple layers to resolve the issue, such as click workers, NCMEC, LEOs, the courts, etc. This case shows that all levels of checks can fail.
I use Lemmy (obviously as I’m posting here) and Cat’s Arch Redlib (https://catsarch.com/) to view Reddit. I sometimes post on the r/poisionai subreddit, as I am disgusted with how AI has been used in general, but that’s a different topic. Also, if you’re using Chrome incognito, you can still be tracked, even with a VPN on and without signing in to your account. Might want to switch browsers to reduce your digital fingerprint. Just a suggestion. Assume anything Google is tracking you at some level for behavioral or personalized advertising. Again, that’s a different topic, but thought it was worth adding.
I hope this has more far reaching effects. These companies pull this kind of nonsense all the time. Right now, they can lock you out of your account without notice or warning or ability to properly appeal. They also often don’t tell you the reason why. Looking at Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple.