Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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I know how obnoxious ads have become on the internet and I've seen how they have progressively gotten longer and more prevalent on YouTube but I don't really know how to feel about this. Conceptually, they are handling and storing so much video data their operating costs must be astronomical. As far as I know, advertisement is the main way they recoup any of that cost so I can't really blame them for this. Maybe they are just reaching a point where they are just too massive to work.
I would agree with you on this if it weren't for the fact that scam ads are so widespread on Youtube and Google that it's almost like they don't care about their users, only money. If they don't care about their users, why should I care about their bottom line. Also, ads I don't have too much of a problem with, but data collection and surveillance I do, and it's hard to block one without blocking the other.
People will choose the most convenient option. It just so happened that, for a brief period, it was more convenient to go through the hassle of installing an adblockers than to sit through the ads for regular users.
The unfortunate reality is that, for some people, moving over to TikTok will be more convenient than watching YouTube ads. Our attention span shrinks a little more, and Google takes one step closer to MySpace.
Youtube makes money from musicians, artists, creators, they wouldn't exist without them. Still, they only give back a small percentage of the profits to the creators. The exploitation fees are a fraction of the money they make. Anyway, lots of people turn off adblock on youtube, most people don't even know it's a thing. So I really dont believe a capitalist company like Google, that have always profit from creators are to pity.
Yeah, im not a fan of people trying to control what I do with my computing hardware. But in youtubes case, at least they pay the creators of monetized videos. I'll still figure out how to block the ads, but it's not like reddit.
YouTube once did a genius and really nice move: Paying the video authors. They realized that treating the people who create the works – that are the entire reason why people use the platform – well and creating an incentive for that work is smart and a good way to grow the platform.
But that time is long gone. YouTube is the monopoly in the market now. They ruin everything that was good about YouTube. They brought the adpocolypse and only pay video authors for videos the content of which they deem friendly to their advertisements business and easy to sell to advertisers based on a completely arbitrary broken automatic system that enforces self censorship on the video authors. All other videos that are still vital to the platform do not get any of the money they make of the viewers the demonetized videos keep on the platform.
They started putting ads on videos that the author did not choose to monetize completely breaking with their system of sharing their revenue with the people who create the basis for that.
While they impose strict arbitrary self censorship on the video authors who want a cut of the revenue their videos allowed to generate they allow a flood of scams and other illegitimate and inappropriate content for advertisers.
They removed the dislike button making the platform much worse for the users just to appeal to advertisers even more.
Yeah, I do think that they will start to try to lower the payments to creators as well, especially as high interest money flushes debt financed cash out of circulation.
Maybe they shouldnt handle and store so much data. I think peertube with a 720p upload limit would be about perfect