YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.
Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
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If they start showing me this message, I’ll have no reasonable choice except to disable the ad blockers for YouTube. Sadly I’m embedded in the Google world with a gmail account and I use their photos service. I can’t risk losing access to those.
No doubt they’ll roll this anti ad block technology out to their other sites in the future and the internet will suddenly be a bleak, hideous place.
There's alternatives for all of that, why are you stuck on Google? You could create a new email on a different site or host your own and there would be no differences between it and a gmail account. For photo services you could build a nas that has auto backup and never pay a penny again to Google. I understand they are pervasive in the modern world so it's hard to escape but there's always options.
for photos there is immich. they also have a guide to import photos from gphotos.
context: immich is a selfhosted app, with fully functional web view and app. the app can do background backups. there are ML jobs configurable on the server to search anything, and have faces of people aggregated.
I can move away from google but I have a lot of sites that I need to swap to using a different email address. Slowly working on it.
Yeah I feel you that was me for a while. Eventually I said enough was enough and every time I came across a service that was linked to my Gmail I unlinked and made a new account. It doesn't have to be all at once, slow and steady wins the race too.
You can just use Piped. That way, your account data appears nowhere. Just a server querying Googles YouTube API.
for whatever reason, i've been having issues using Piped where videos just don't buffer at all. Anyone else facing this? NewPipe on my phone works perfectly though
Could be because of some Codec shenanigans. Is that on a PC?
Tried a different instance?
I had that problem, not sure what made it go away maybe allowing scripts or disabling ublock origin.
+1 for Piped
There is a few tampermonkey (extension) scripts that disable the message. This is the one I use;
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/478457-youtube-anti-anti-adblock
It's taken me about 2 years to degoogle as much as I have. I've moved google photos to dropbox (soon NextCloud), gmail to fastmail, search to Kagi, music to Tidal, docs to NextCloud, and (most recently) youtube to Invidious/Freetube. None of it was particularly hard, though switching from gmail took ages. Still using android, but that's next on the chopping block.
Invidious and Freetube are still YouTube though?
Yes. I see it like using a custom android ROM, it couldn't exist without Google but its the most private I can be while not going without. I do watch as many creators as possible via Nebula, though.