YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 144 points –
YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues
theregister.com

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues::Ad blockers are firewalls for our sanity – turning them off is madness

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Google in general doesn't give a flying fuck about your privacy

EDIT: actually, they do care so much about it being shared with them :P

Yep, it is one of the main reasons I have been switching away from Google products. Proton Mail for email, for example. I have no desire to give Google every detail of what I do online.

Oh yes it does, it cares about your privacy being shared with them.

Does this surprise anyone?

I don’t think any big corporate company cares about your privacy at all. They just want revenue.

Google was founded to sell your private data for money to pay for services you want. It's just taken them 15 years to become big enough that their stock holders demand more money than a couple of 5 second ads per video.

They'll squeeze a couple more bucks out of ads, then they'll squeeze a couple more out of premium, but not enough people will go past that. They can't keep pulling profit out of thin air for wall streets demand for perpetual increase.

Sooner or later some of the following will have to happen:

Mandatory login to watch

Users/Content providers pay a premium for quality

Content providers pay for storage

New or low rated content providers pay for hosting until they reach minimum subscribers.

Premium gets unskippable 5 second ads.

No embedding off site.

In other news, air contains oxygen.

[Company] cares more about its shareholders and profits more than [the environment, safety, its employees or customers, the economy, etc.] Not sure why this would be a revelation to anyone.

Well, caring less for your privacy means more revenue for them, so yes.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of "you freeloading scum."

The reason YouTube has been dabbling with its own "Unblock Or Eff Off" strategy instead of bringing down the universal banhammer is that it knows how much it will upset the balance of the ecosystem.

Google has revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars, while publishers struggle to survive, and users have to wear a metaphorical hazmat suit to stay sane.

The pre-internet days saw advertising directly support publishers who knew how to attract the right audiences who would respond well to the right adverts.

YouTube's business model is a microcosm of the bigger ad tech world, where it basically needs to spam millions to generate enough results for its advertisers.

Of course, this wouldn't provide the revenues to YouTube or the ad tech business obtainable by being spammy counterfeits of responsible companies with a lock on the market.


The original article contains 748 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Just pay for the service. Then you can run all the blockers you want.