It seems so strange to me that we are locked in battle with providers mining our lives for whatever, and we have to work our asses off trying to stay anonymous, to the point of being denied service

It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.

The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don't have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it's reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user's data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.

These companies don't do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.

Whatever you are getting your hands into remember that there's plenty of free alternatives and libre products available in the public domain. Supporting these is a good way to unsupport the closed counterpart.

The NYT, Guardian, BBC and many others have onion sites you can access via tor that have none of that shit because they assume you're a Chinese dissident or something (and no ads).

Yeah it's weird how privacy and piracy have blended together over the years.

With some games you need to pirate them if you don't want a Russian nesting doll of launchers and accounts that are able to leak your information and fill your computer with bloat.

I do find the argument interesting some YouTubers try to make about ad blockers being a form of piracy.

It is not strange. They are greedy. Period. If ever someone is less greedy, then even if only after they die the corp becomes as greedy as possible, ASAP - e.g. Disney.

What's weird is that we are also hard-wired to be generous, so piracy does weird things to our conscience. If that bothers you, my advice is to learn to tip well irl, and in CASH whenever possible - the WORKERS deserve your aid.

What's more crazy is that the very ISPs that track all of our information and sell to the highest better are the same ones sending us letters and emails when we use torrents that they'll shut off our services if we continue to pirate movies and music.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

You see, the paperclip maximizer is real. Only, it isn't paperclips. We are being compressed into currency.

I remember the Internet in the early to late 90s. What a magical time it was. I've said for years now that giant corporations are going to basically buy out the Internet and pidgin hole you into using their services. They've basically accomplished that goal.

Corpos are greedy for money and will attack anything that stands between them and it. That is until the Govt steps in, then the lobbiests fend it off with handfulls of money.

This is almost verbatim the definition of a dystopia, fwiw.

eta: the start of it is nearly a Black Mirror episode

Set up a private dns too, just in case of an ambush.

to the point of being denied service

Yes. Spotify blocks my account if I'm using VPN, ChatGPT asks to solve ridiculous captchas (on a paid account!). It's crazy. Reddit blocks access if you're on the VPN and not logged in.

Capitalism.

You know what would be pretty baller? A VPN credit union kind of thing where people ask over the place have their IP substituted with anyone else's in the network! Just join in with a certain minimum of bandwidth?

Worse is when you have to justify your view on privacy to family and friends.

Use residential IP and the friction stops

Sounds like a book of Victor Pelevin

How do I set up a YouTube account anonymously?

I want to use revanced and figured setting up a youtube account not attached to my Gmail is a good idea. But they require a phone number.

But if I'm using an android maybe it doesn't matter anyway and Google will know I'm not looking at their ads? If they want to delete me Gmail and whatever I'm sure they could right?

Preach it.