Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Implying that deleting them from your view actually deleted them.
My man thought he was permanently erasing it from history.
Next you’ll tell me cognito mode isn’t keeping my browsing completely private! /s
How can my workplace admin block Pornhub even when I’m using private mode? He shouldn’t even be allowed to see what I do privately!
I mean, this is mostly borne from a fundamental misunderstanding of what “Private Browsing” mode is and was meant to be.
When you open an incognito tab on Chrome, it literally says “Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity.”
It also says
Fuck using Chrome and I’m not defending Google at all here, but they never once claimed Incognito was anything more than it was.
Pretty sure Firefox says that too. Users just don’t read. Like, ever. They’ll get an error message saying “Important!” and click whatever button seems most likely to make it go away before calling support and demanding they “fix the computer”.
If the incognito mode is not keeping your browsing private, imagine the cognitive mode!
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Surely they’ll actually comply, not be caught in an audit years down the line and given a friendly “Now now, we talked about this: don’t get caught breaking the law again!” slap on the wrist for failing to delete and instead further monetising that data?
Under GDPR and DMA, there would be real consequences. Like “being broken up or cease to exist” magnitude of consequences. Why would they risk it for the 1% of users who actually care and set their privacy settings accordingly?
Google doesnt care about you or anyones personal data. They care about the amount they collect. If the most privacy-aware users wrestle back some data and have it deleted, so be it. Google couldnt care less. Users are like cattle to them, as long as the general “data harvest rate” looks okay they wont investigate the odd one out.
Forgive me for being cynical about the odds of those consequences actually being enacted. Giving the courts a weapon for getting such companies in line is one thing, getting the judges to actually fire it another.
A law is only ever as good as its enforcement.
If I’m wrong, of course, I’ll be glad to learn that. I’ve just run out of optimism halfway through adolescence.
Check this out:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
Facebook (and the complicit Irish Data Protection Comission) thought so too, an were rekt.
The case invalidated 2 seperate “safe harbor” agreements between the EU and the USA, making ANY data transfer of EU customers private data to the USA illegal without explicit consent. It was literally pandemonium in the IT sector for a few months, everyone was running stuff in US clouds and panicking.
This is what makes the EU high court (ECJ/EuGh) special: noone can pressure them politically. They couldn’t care less what anyone but EU law says.
And that was “just” GDPR, now they have way more EU laws (DMA, DSA) they can throw at FAANG.
Huh. Neat. Thanks for that!
This isn’t some trivial information like your precise location history, this is serious.
doesn’t even matter. what matters is the meta data. if the data from the list say you like science videos with emphasis on electrical engineering, star wars podcasts and mmorpg let’s plays - does that data go away apon history deletion. what about meta-meta data. if the meta data puts you on group X that receive content Y, does that go away apon history deletion. and what kind of integration does that get with the rest of the google knowledge about you…
I doubt turning off history truly does what it says either though. I think it was more about avoiding the shitty algo recc’s that try to turn everyone’s dad and uncle into a far right extremist.
They are required to do so if you do it through account settings