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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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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Talking on the YouTube front, a trivially small donation will support them far more than watching ads ever could. Even something as small as $1/year is often far more than they would ever make from you in a year. As far as donations to developers go, it depends entirely on what you feel comfortable with. Most people who work on open source projects are unpaid volunteers, so it isn't expected that you donate, but if you choose to do so it can be quite helpful to sustaining the project. If many people in the userbase were to make small donations, that would go a long way.
In reality, ads almost entirely benefit exploitative multi-billion dollar companies such as Google and Facebook, so my personal philosophy stands against them. I much prefer donating to people directly to cut out the exploitative middle-man.
I was going to write exactly that. I have a channel with tens of thousands of subs, and a $1 donation from a single user generates more income than multiple ads to that same user. Patreon, or a straight-up donation (of any amount), is so much better than suffering through ads.
Ads kill content, it disrespects users, it steals attention away from what you've created, builds frustration and breaks the flow of your content, and they serve only to benefit Google & partners.
But if YouTube doesn't earn enough how will they be able to maintain the site? Agree that they can earn a little less but for some reason it doesn't work that way (I'm not aware of a service of such scale which keep profit at minimum) 🤷
YouTube was not profitable for quite some time, just like Reddit and Twitter have been struggling with. They have massively increased their advertising and data collection over a number of years, decreased the cut paid to creators, and become more and more exploitative of user data, so at this point they now account for about 10% of Google/Alphabet's total yearly profits. While I have not seen an ad in years, I have been told that ads have become unskippable, multiple ads play consecutively, and there are numerous ad breaks throughout the video. The last time I saw an ad in YouTube, everything was skippable and ads were basically only ever at the beginning and end of videos, where creators actively wanted them. Now they are apparently incredibly intrusive and disruptive, and I'm under the impression that content creators can't even choose when they show up in the video.
YouTube enjoys an almost complete monopoly, and that isn't going to change anytime in the near future. The infrastructure costs for another company to develop a similar platform would be immense, and getting people to switch from YouTube at this point is practically impossible on both the content creator and viewer side. YouTube massively underpays its creators, and they become more and more anti-consumer and anti-creator every year. It seems they are even moving to ban in-video sponsorships in the near future because they don't make money off of them.
The only open source alternatives I am aware of that have any amount of scale are PeerTube and Odysee, neither of which come anywhere close to rivaling YouTube. I personally wouldn't worry about your decision affecting YouTube's profit margins; very few people even try to block ads, and even fewer use alternative frontends like NewPipe, Invidious, or Piped, so YouTube's profit margins will be determined by the complacency of the general masses anyway.
If you'd like to get into the ethics discussion of whether or not YouTube should profit, I'd be happy to provide my justification as to why I'd love to see Google/Alphabet as a company die. They exist solely to exploit their userbase for profit, and I don't believe that to be justifiable. But that conversation is practically irrelevant, as your decision as a single user has no realistic impact on YouTube's profits anyway.