When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?
You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.
Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced. Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others. Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube… You get the point.
You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.
All the content i watch gets age locked because youtube is run by prudes.
For now. Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.
that’s a problem too, but the discussion was about interacting with google. fuck them for showing ads down our throats, but at least they don’t know who watches the video (when using a proxy like invidious), and so they can’t build a profile of you, and they can’t bombard you with tailored manipulative ads either, just something possibly totally irrelevant.
also. if you want to watch youtube on teevee on normal hardware, you are pretty much paying for premium…
Enshittification is guaranteed even for the paid tier.
Maybe there’ll be silver, gold and platinum memberships next. How long til you realize you’ve been had?