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Thread: The End of Privacy

  1. #11
    El bot. geoffbot's Avatar
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    I don't use a pc at home, just my Samsung. Bixby is annoying - you could go pixel instead.
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  2. #12
    I have no idea what Bixby is , I swapped from android (Motorola something or other ) to a ‘cheap’ Apple a couple or three years ago (SE at about £300)
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  3. #13
    El bot. geoffbot's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Seriously View Post
    I have no idea what Bixby is , I swapped from android (Motorola something or other ) to a ‘cheap’ Apple a couple or three years ago (SE at about £300)
    Bixby is Samsung's crap google/sori alternative that they want to push to tie you into their ecosystem so you never jump ship to pixle etc. No one uses it.
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  4. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by geoffbot View Post
    I don't use a pc at home, just my Samsung. Bixby is annoying - you could go pixel instead.
    You don't degooglify your life by buying another Google product.

    Quote Originally Posted by Seriously View Post
    I have no idea what Bixby is , I swapped from android (Motorola something or other ) to a ‘cheap’ Apple a couple or three years ago (SE at about £300)
    Bixby is Samsung's Siri with a dedicated button on their phones despite the fact that nobody cares about this feature. To properly remap this button for other uses, you need to get a third party app.

  5. #15
    I'm writing this in response to Seriously's question, but I'll treat the subject more broadly, so the post may not turn out as brief as I initially thought it would.

    It's also related to this part of my previous post here:

    Next step: complete de-Googling, once I figure out how to do it smoothly and convince myself that I'm OK with having a limited access to YouTube and forgetting about the convenience of Google Pay.
    YouTube ads
    On my personal laptops I haven't seen YouTube ads for years. My primary privacy configuration for a long time was the browser Mozilla Firefox and the following three extensions (or add-ons, or plug-ins, whatever they call them): uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. (I'm linking to info about these rather than downloads, you can download and install them from within your browser, if supported). It was probably uBlock Origin doing all the job but uBO and Privacy Badger do provide a degree of redundancy on visited sites: if one doesn't catch something, there's a good chance the other will.

    YouTube annotations
    I remember these were a b*tch. In theory, YT has a setting where you can explicitly turn them on and off, but in practice they were getting turned on again and again. On one of my machines I managed to get rid of them completely, but I can't exactly remember how. I can see that I have the Youtube's Annotations No More extension installed there (linking to Chrome version, as I don't know if the one for Firefox is still the same thing, the icon has changed), but more likely I added an overlay blocking rule in uBO.

    YouTube playback habits
    One of the best uses of extensions I've ever made was installing Replace YouTube's Home with Subscriptions (again, linking to Chrome version, but it's there for Firefox as well). What it does is by default go to your YT Subscriptions page rather than your 'feed' with all the noise YouTube thinks is the best for you to see. You can check how it works by simply going to YouTube and clicking Subscriptions -- this is what you're going to see when you go to youtube.com after you install the extension. The trade off (or gain, as I see it) is obviously not seeing the 'feed', ie YouTube's recommendations, anymore. (Well, you kind of still see some on the sidebar when you watch a particular video, but they're not shoved in your throat anymore). Also, it makes all the 'notification bell' madness irrelevant -- you don't have to click bells to get notifications about videos that don't make it to your feed, because you go through all videos provided by creators that you've subscribed to.

    Browsers and extensions
    As mentioned earlier, I use Firefox as my primary browser. In addition to the extensions listed in the 'YouTube ads' part above, in the last few days I installed CanvasBlocker to counter fingerprinting, Decentraleyes and Invidition (this last one being a direct answer to Seriously's 'how do you do that?').

    My secondary browser is Brave. You can think of it as Firefox with my three core add-ons implemented by default. I don't use any separately installed add-ons with it, it's basically good out of the box with a few settings adjusted. This would be a sensible solution for folks who want reasonable privacy protection and ad blocking without having to dig deeper into details. It's also built around the same Chromium base as Chrome, which many of you probably use.

    As to Google's Chrome itself, I can't really say much, I haven't used it for years. Most, if not all, crucial extensions should be available in it, but I have no idea how much sense it makes to use them if Google has control of everything anyhow.

    Switching to such browsers as Firefox or Brave does not mean that you can blindly trust them and think that your privacy is in good hands. As an anecdote: a few months ago there was a conundrum where all Firefox extensions stopped working due to some mess-up with certificate expiries due to some error, or flaw, in the way how FF was handling them. It caused a massive uproar and FF team provide a solution within a few hours. However, the solution required turning on what is called 'Firefox studies', a feature through which they gather users' data to learn about and improve their products. It immediately raised a red flag to me, and after a little search I found out that what they provided through the 'studies' could have (and was, by someone else) made available as a simple standalone file to install. Conclusion: like utmost arseholes, they used a crisis situation to harvest data from users.

    invidio.us
    invidio.us is a front-end to YouTube that allows you to access YouTube content stripped of all bloat and privacy compromises that come with it. It allows you to watch age-restricted vids without logging in to (or, for that matter having) a YouTube/Google account. (There are other ways to do that, too). What appeals to me in this service is that I could import my YT subscriptions, so I can continue to follow the content that I want to. I'm still at the stage of trying it out.

    I think that's it for now -- if this post helps even one person to regain some control over how they use YouTube and perhaps even regain some control over their privacy when using the webz, it was worth it.

    More info: https://www.privacytools.io/
    Last edited by rodia77; Sep 2, 2019 at 09:08 PM.

  6. #16
    Gonna try this Invidio.us site


    Goes to Invidio and sees "LOG IN" button



    I'm just trying watching one of my current you tubers that I've been watching - I don't follow anyone - I HATE logging in just to watch videos so I never have, I just watch videos that interest me - if they want me to log in or show I'm over 18 then I don't watch it.... maybe I just remember their names?

    Anyway, I'll report back some time
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  7. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Seriously View Post
    Gonna try this Invidio.us site


    Goes to Invidio and sees "LOG IN" button



    I'm just trying watching one of my current you tubers that I've been watching - I don't follow anyone - I HATE logging in just to watch videos so I never have, I just watch videos that interest me - if they want me to log in or show I'm over 18 then I don't watch it.... maybe I just remember their names?

    Anyway, I'll report back some time
    Age restriction workarounds:
    1. invidious will probably work -- replace "https://www.youtube.com/" with "https://invidio.us/".
    2. alternatively -- replace the "watch?v=" with "embed/"

    Country/region restriction workaround: VPN (I use NordVPN, but when my 3-year subscription runs out, I'll probably look into Proton)

  8. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by rodia77 View Post
    As soon as I saw who was the presenter of that video I stopped playback, I can't stand him
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  9. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by rodia77 View Post
    You don't degooglify your life by buying another Google product.
    Actually, because you can easily unlock the bootloader on a Pixel, it isn't a bad place to start if you want to remove google from your life and don't want to use iOS.

    The exact methods are above my understanding as a non-developer / non-engineer, but XDA has all the resources you would ever need.
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  11. #20
    That's true if you trust that Google devices are clean on hardware level.

    Unlocking the bootloader and, subsequently, rooting my phone is (naturally ) on my to-do list, but I need to educate myself more on the subject.

  12. Likes Radharc liked this post

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