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I am sadly drawn to Youtube in my downtime. I have a pretty eclectic taste in what I want to watch to relax, which includes front-window hour-long views of tram rides in various European capital cities, trips through sewers and Chernobyl tunnels, and various waterworks. Yeah, I guess I am a bit weird.
Anyway, I try to use various libre vewers for youtube streams, but sometimes I just want to watch on my TV without dicking around with computers.
After a break for a few months, Roku updated my youtube app, which no longer allows 'guest' viewers. I really don't want to log into any google accounts, except for my phone account which I don't use for anything else.
It really pisses me off. I am pretty sure Google knows exactly who I am. I am not the smartest person in most rooms anymore, but I can think of a dozen ways Google can triangulate my identity. Just having my phone in the same room should be enough, without resorting to statistical methods.
I am pretty sure Google is working pretty hard to not let us know how much it knows about us, because even the normies who think little about privacy would find it creepy.
P.S. I know Google can tell how far I am from the WiFi transceiver, and I am alone in the room. I am pretty sure they know the size of my TV, use a reasonable viewing distance, figure out exactly where it is. They know the layout of my home from various flyovers/drivebys with Google Maps and correlations with various tax and municipal data. I have no doubt they can deduce the location of my TV and my bed, correlating distances between where my phone is at night and various WiFi devices in the neighborhood. They know the orientation of my phone at any given moment as well. It's not even a challenging problem.
Sep 20 · 3 months ago · 👍 papaya, mrrobinhood5
🖥️ mrrobinhood5 · Sep 21 at 03:20:
it's scary how 30 years ago we were taught about the dangers of sharing too much on the Internet and now here we are sharing too much on the Internet
This worries me a lot, too. Such morally bankrupt companies are having access to everything you do all the time with such precision, and they are selling this data to everyone paying. Now add to this total decay of politics, and in result something totally innocent now (playing games for more than 2h a day or watching politically incorrect video) might be punishable by death in near future because some crazy democratically-elected dictator want to breed his ideal nation of super-humans…
🚀 stack [OP] · Sep 21 at 14:38:
Actually it let me use it. Apparently, the home button takes you to a 'login now' screen at first, but as soon as you watch anything (from a search, e.g.) the home screen is populated with algo-selected videos.
A single searched video, unsurprisingly, gave me my usual favorites. Because it knew exactly what I like.
In Europe it would be totally illegal to do anything like that: any personally identifying information has to be collected with permission for specified purposes.
Everywhere else, it's just not worth it. When 99% of people are happy with the default privacy settings on offer, why do extra work for the 1% who are trying to avoid being tracked? The extra complexity would be significant, and the risk of negative publicity, for negligible additional profit.
🌻 softwarepagan · Sep 23 at 02:16:
@Aelspire This is my fear for the future too.