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Comment by gloosx | Hacker News Reader

Since Youtube started to show me funny "TURN OFF THE ADBLOCKER!!!" notices, I just started slamming links in yt-dlp and watching them offline. No drawbacks so far.

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It will become harder to ignore the possible retaliation Google can make against your/your family’s Google accounts.

Would not be an easy one to swallow but I don't have a false expectation that these accounts are mine in any sense. They are Google's, and I'm just renting it paying with my personal data to feed the AdSense machine. Any day they might decide to do what they want with it, there might be a bug or a technical issue which will lock me out, and I doubt I would have a single way to influence it, the customer care or user support is clearly not a priority for this company and is virtually non-existent.

If you care enough, back up your data - they have to hand it to you.

I can control my own digital life, but I don’t have the resources to do the same for every family member. An old age family member owning Android devices for a decade is virtually impossible to untangle from Google.

I installed e/os on my phone the other day and haven't encountered any serious drawbacks yet.

I don't have any illusion that this is not how things are but I don't think that should mean that we accept this. We can very well demand that if google wants to take over that much of people's lives that they should not get to do whatever they want. This becomes even more important when you have less and less options for realistic alternatives.

Friendly reminder to enable periodic personal data extraction from google (Google Takeout) and back it up so you don't lose your digital life in the rare case of being blocked.

Might be better to just de-Google yourself. If google is isolated to just one feature, then it's not a big deal.

This is why I have de-Googled my family - at least for the most part. The hardest part was Gmail. Hundreds of services and accounts relied on that email address for 2FA. If I were to be blocked from it, I would be screwed. So I bought a domain and spent the next couple of years migrating everything to it. Pain in the ass, but now no one can ever ban me from my own email address. Worst case scenario my provider blocks me and I switch to another one in minutes. Plus I can do cool things like catch-all, so when I sign up for services I use "verizon@[mydomain.com]". I have caught many cheeky fuckers selling my email address to spammers.

Outside of this there is very little harm in my Google account being banned now. I'd lose some YouTube watch history and a few locations on Google Maps.

takeout.google.com backs up watch history, google maps locations (probably)

The problem is not saving my data, it's losing access to the email account. I have hundreds of accounts like trading, social media, forums, GitHub, media, etc, which require access to my email account for 2FA. If I lose access to my email accounts, I lose access to those accounts. Some might be recoverable with a lot of effort, but many would be gone forever.

I understand, it is a horrible risk, the only answer is to get your own domain and then use an email service routed through that domain. Your ability to control your domain records should be modifiable even if your email provider is down.

Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap. That is how tractor supply stole a gift card from me so I have turned many of their customers away from them and they have lost exponentially more than they stole from me. So now I use realistic looking aliases and just have my own lookup table that describes which one is for which company.

Thanks for the heads up. It hasn't caused me any issues yet but if it does, I will think long and hard about whether I want to use that service.

>> Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap.

> It hasn't caused me any issues yet [...]

Ugh, I ran into this earlier this year when creating an Airbnb account. I tried registering with "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and was confused when account creation would error out with an unhelpful error message (don't remember what exactly). After checking with multiple browsers to make sure it's not some browser or uBlock Origin problem, I suspected it might have something to do with the "airbnb" in the alias. Sure enough, I created some temporary alias without "airbnb" in it and ... it worked. I wasn't willing to tolerate their sh— "load of crap" though, so once the account was created I tried to change the email back to "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and ... it worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Then i'll just stop using their services.

And if they're too big for people to not use them, then they need to be split up as they've attained (virtual) monopoly over specific market.

It really would be nice if they weren’t allowed to create the equivalent of the digitally unbanked by unilaterally wielding this power without any kind of due process.

I've stopped logging into YouTube for this reason. Next step is to install a "YouTube browser" and configure my VPN to make sure all connections from that browser go over the VPN rather than my ISP's direct connection.

YouTube is the only thing I use a Google account for. If they "retaliate", I can probably just open another one.

I am sorry but what kind od argument is this? Do what Google told you to do or it will retaliate? Are you talking about some dystopian overlord?

Your statement alone should force your to rethink what you are doing and change your online behaviour.

Haven’t you seen people getting their Google accounts banned out of the blue? Haven’t you seen the great lengths that YouTube goes (in terms of content control) to please its advertisers? Haven’t you seen the cat-and-mouse fight between YouTube and yt-dlp (and similars)?

There is no “if”, but only a “when” for all of those things will be connected.

It’s naïve to think you can make YouTube not get paid without them trying to stop you. And it’s quite likely this is already against their ToS.

Of course I have seen it. This is exactly what I meant. If you are doing something because you are afraid of 'retaliation' you should not use those services at all. For anything.

You can be afraid of heights or earthquake or driving fast on mountain roads. Not google. For all that is holy: corporation should not make you afraid of doing something.

I should have used different words. I wouldn’t care much about using yt-dlp, as I barely use Google and would survive an account ban. Other family members _in the same household_ could be immensely more affected by my actions.

Off-topic but I've found that best way to open YT is without account. No recommendations on frontpage. Just you and the search bar.

Mine is now being limited to 3 videos and a warning we will block you next time. They also removed the wide view button. I just copy the link and watch it on Firefox nightly not logged in to youtube with adblock and youtube does not complain. A bit of a hassle but I can still watch.

Are you using uBlock Origin on Firefox?

You don't have videos stop playing after exactly 1 minute ?

I had that for a while but it turned out to be due to having both uBlock and NoScript on that machine. Now it's good for me.

For me it was uMatrix, which seems to be, sadly, abandoned these days...

uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome seems to be working really well for me. Check out your filter lists and maybe tick a few boxes.

There is a way to watch the video anyways, on YT with just 2 clicks.

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