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YouTube (file.coffee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago (16 children)

Reasons not to buy premium:

Google having a history of all the videos you watch via your account.
Even if Google provided an option to opt out of tracking there would be no reason to trust then since they have lied about not tracking people in the past.
YouTube seems to redirect any Premium profits intended to creators to the entity which made a copyright claim on a video. This would be sensible if YouTube’s copyright claim system wasn’t so vulnerable to abuse. Normal (yellow) demonetisation will pay out from Premium though. https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc?si=5-wFn2SqPZLdOlqa
Features are removed from YouTube to incentivise Premium such as playing videos while your phone screen is locked.
Similar to above, Google have been increasing the amount of ads particularly on phones where ad blockers are harder to use. I.E. pushing users to Premium not by making the service better, but by making non-Premium worse.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Point one: I'm pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you're on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want. Is it Ideal? No. But you should've acted 10-15 years prior if you wanted to stop this. It's still not ideal though.

Point two: I agree. There does need to be space for them to repent, but they aren't actively trying to, so don't trust them (see the next point as an example of that).

Point three That's a shame. They really need to fix that, though with how corpos do things nowadays, not sure that'll happen.

Point four: That's normal, expected and a reasonable business decision. Most of these features they likely added after premium, and they're meant as incentives. Why else would you want to but their premium, if not for the added features?

Point five: This is shitty and mostly inexcusable behaviour. It's god awful, and they really shouldn't do it. I do have to play devil's advocate a little. They are fully, 100% in their right to do this. If you don't like it, vote with your wallet (and time). If we stop using their services, they'll stop making it worse. They are still A-holes for doing it though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Point one: I'm pretty certain they already track that. With or without account. And you're on the internet, without a VPN there is no privacy. You are also able to remove that history any moment you want.

I mean sure, they could try combining the user agents my unofficial apps provide with my carrier's NAT IP to build a profile on me, but it would be highly inefficient and imprecise to the point where it's almost useless for them. With a Youtube Premium account they have an identity tied to an email address, full name, and payment info that they can relate every click in their apps and websites to. If I also use their other services with the same account, I would be paying them to spy on everything I do and sell my data, so other companies can sell me crap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

If you've already got that much of a set-up to guarantee privacy, it's a very good point. Most people aren't that dedicated to privacy (I think), but it's still a very valid point in your case

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