23h ago

How can one consume media these days with any sort of privacy?

With a privacy protecting setup, the mainstream internet is almost unusable. To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification. Youtube doesn't work when not signed into a Google account, or if one is connected to a VPN. Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless by the strict access controls of the major platforms. There is a vast amount of community, DIY, and educational material of all sorts behind these platform walls, so how can someone who doesn't want to be tracked access any of it these days?

There are alternatives like archive.org and peertube which are wonderful but have nowhere near the amount of content that people have been uploading to YouTube over the years. For example, if I need to fix a washing machine and there is a tutorial on YouTube, how can I see it while still preserving a modicum of privacy online?

16 comments

Let's see if moving some letters around can get us to an answer
PRIVACY
PRIACY
PIRACY
Theres your answer.
Seriously, though, if you want audiovisual media like you specified, you either stick to pirating shit off Usenet or browsing YouTube through frontends within your onion browser, preferably using onion mail.
Other than that (and maybe even then) there's gonna be at least a few machines that have exactly what you watched and when.
I will agree with you to an extent but:
To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification.
Yes and no. Many of them you can not use a phone number if you know how (Sign up with Gmail) but it shouldn't be any surprise because all of these companies are data mining and advertising operations.
Obviously you're posting to the alternative right now.
Youtube doesn't work when not signed into a Google account
Yes it does?
or if one is connected to a VPN
That does complicate things. Sometimes you have to switch servers, but for the most part, it still works.
Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless
I downloaded 78 videos yesterday with it?
It depends on what media you're consuming? Nearly all the media I consume is text based and works without JS. It's usually available as plain HTML files or markdown files or similar, or in an ebook format like epub or pdf that I can download and read with zathura.
For audio-visual content it's harder yeah. FreeTube and yt-dlp are working for me with Mullvad VPN as of time of writing. Some invidious instances are still working too. But I hardly ever watch YouTube—I think you may find that you miss YT much less than you'd expect, and if Google makes you pick between privacy and YouTube, you should pick privacy.
- Yea, well, I bet you still jerk off manually
Your local library has plenty of media.
For everything but IG and FB, there's a mess of alternative front ends. For YT, there's a dozen ways to log in with an alt front end app. Freetube, Grayjay, all the pipe pipe pipe apps. Then Invidious routing traffic.
It sounds like you're over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.
Maybe ask in a privacy community and get specific on needs and your threat model.
- Does FreeTube work for you? It gives me "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" for every single video. It might work without VPN but I'm not interested enough to try.
  It sounds like you’re over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.
  Wisely put and I suspect you're right, but if it's really just about using a VPN I feel like, "Well why do you want to know my IP address so bad?". I did do the JS blocking trick for a totally unusable web experience but now I allow JS and it's just a widely unusable web experience ¯(ツ)/¯
  Edit: doesn't lemmy.world block people from posting through a VPN?
When I have to use a big tech platform I use a privacy preserving proxy site like invidious for youtube. The LibRedirect extension for Firefox makes it really easy and has a surprising number of sites it can serve mirrors for
- Thanks, I'll look into LibRedirect.
  Edit: it has that scary "Access your data for all websites" permission...
- None of these things are reliable to any degree.
  
  I don’t really have issues with them aside from the youtube mirrors 🤷‍♂️ and even then libredirect lets you set fallbacks so I just stack them and rarely have problems
Yeah, content is quickly being hidden behind all sorts of walls, and even governments are now passing laws to render content inaccessible without ID verification
I have just come to accept that the internet has shrunk. I liked it better back when it was smaller anyway. But it is frustrating whenever I have a problem that has been carefully solved by some random person on Reddit or some middle aged man on YouTube 20 years ago, only for it to be rendered inaccessible without giving up all kinds of privacy.
- Yes, it seems wrong that now Google, one of the biggest companies of all time and one under a hostile regime, controls access to knowledge and information that individuals all around the world have worked together to compile over decades. Looking back now that we know about enshitification, we should have been more careful.
- I long for the days of dumbphones. I’m seriously considering going dumb again. I hate this modern age and day we live in.
I look at youtube sometimes but I don't have an account on it. yt-dlp worked for me last time I tried (maybe a few weeks ago) though there is a constant cat and mouse game. I guess it stopped working on age gated videos a while back. Other than that, if anything I would say there is too much video about stuff I would prefer to read about.
- Yes, for me yt-dlp went from working to error 404 to working to error 403 :/

16 comments