But these sham community engagement exercises piss me off

That’s Google for you: they’ve been doing self-serving open-source for decades.

For instance: they open-sourced Android. That helped Android become the dominant platform and Google capture the cellphone market. Since then, Google has been slowly moving their stuff away from the open-source AOSP and into their proprietary stack, introduced proprietary features that are almost compulsory for a practical, working Android system like Play Protect, and are actively killing deGoogled ROMs.

There’s only one thing to keep in mind with Google: if they do something, it’s not in your interest, and they know how to play long games. Anything they do will be used against you some day.

It’s Microsoft. Assume surveillance.

I’m fascism-intolerant. Different disease, but one I’m proud to suffer from.

Well, Proton can move wherever they want and be as good as they what, I’ll never be a customer again because of what their fuckhead CEO Andy Yen said.

I don’t care that he’s backpedaled, I don’t care that Andy Yen isn’t Proton-the-company, and I’m even willing to accept it was a very unfortunate duh moment on his part. Here the thing: I don’t have many ways as a nobody to get back at Trump, but one way is to not give any of my money to anybody who enabled him, even by mistake.

So Proton is on my shitlist forever thanks to Yen.

A good 10 years. I’ve had zero issues, with my account or my family members’.

That’s why my email provider is in Norway and not Switzerland. Norway has much stronger privacy laws.

I use CalyxOS too. But Google doesn’t like it and they’ve taken steps to stop us.
So, enjoy the freedom while you can: the big G is coming for it.

It’s okay if you’re fully in control and it’s built with redundancy.

Yeah DDG has been serving up AI slop lately, it’s really annoying.

Ducky see, ducky do. It’s kind of pathetic…

Because alternative clients offer features that only the for-pay official client offers, like subscriptions and playlists, and Google can’t collect data on what people subscribe to or their playlists because in alternative clients, they’re stored locally.

Google doesn’t hate third-party clients because they skip ads: it hates them because they impede surveillance and privacy invasion, which is the true bread and butter of Google.

Awesome! I didn’t know. I’m gonna try it now. Thanks!

Oh wow interesting. Thanks!

…for the desktop.

Newpipe and Grayjay are still going strong on Android.

Google clearly has the ability to break any and all third party client at any time.

My theory is that they’re conducting random campaigns of working-but-not-all-the-time on this or that client at different times to grind everybody down and force them to comply through shear exhaustion. Because if they banned all 3rd party client outright, it would negatively impact the antitrust case against them.

Markup applies to titles in Lemmy. But be aware that titles are displayed raw above comments so don’t go too crazy with it, so your titles display okay raw too 🙂

Personally, if I can’t watch Youtube in third party clients - which happens regularly courtesy of Google - then I don’t watch Youtube at all. The official clients are simply too painful - not to mention, a privacy-invading nightmare.

Fixed.

There has been so many of them, to be honest I picked the first one I found 🙂

All the invidious instances I’ve tried either don’t work or their API is disabled - Sorry I didn’t see “through your browser”.

Not all invidious instances work. A lot of them have been hit by Youtube. But NewPipe still works - until it gets targeted too I guess. It’s a game of cat and mouse with Google - and it’s fucking tiring.

Yeah but China ain’t a democracy and Apple has their stuff manufactured in China. So you’d expect them to bend over backward to comply there.

The UK on the other hand is nominally a democracy, and Apple has no vital need to keep the UK powers that be happy. Apple could very well decide to tell them to pound sand and pull out of the country for the sake of principles, and I guarantee you the UK would quickly back down.

If Apple hadn’t complied in the UK, they would have lost a bit of profits for a while, and gained a ton of good will and credibility. They chose profits. Because corporation.

Incidentally, this whole thing should tell you how much of a democracy the UK really is.

What I’m saying is, the best way to ensure Google doesn’t leak your email address is to not provide your email address to Google.

No email address should be necessary to watch Youtube videos. The only reason Google wants your details is to track your watching habits more easily.