I’m also switching between two books! One is The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe and the other is Educated by Tara Westover.

Maybe you can check https://privacyterminal.com/ and https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ to see what may be being used to track you.

But you don’t want it to randomize the fingerprint with every webpage change, that itself becomes an identifiable signal.

I hope this has more far reaching effects. These companies pull this kind of nonsense all the time. Right now, they can lock you out of your account without notice or warning or ability to properly appeal. They also often don’t tell you the reason why. Looking at Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple.

Just came across this comparison recently in the book The Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence). Highly recommend. Also, I’d be curious to read any books that cover these AI sweatshops.

I meant to say, not directly use their services for video and definitely aim to give them less identifiable information. Like Invidious’s Yewtu.be (https://yewtu.be/) scrapes YouTube and is not reliant on their API (but does give IP addresses to YouTube, hence the use of a VPN), but FreeTube uses YouTube’s API by default I think, but can use Invidious’s scrapping API (https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/privacy/). PeerTube is not reliant on YouTube at all and can be a good alternative even though it may have fewer videos (since you use that, then you’ve basically degoogled in that case). Maybe once a month or less I will watch a video from any of those services, so I don’t ever subscribe to any channels. I prefer to read documentation rather over watching videos when possible. To me that is in the spirit of degoogling. Same as I don’t avoid every website that has some script of Google under the hood. But I do block their trackers by activating “No Google” (https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google) from time to time if it doesn’t break a website (some website I need to access for work might not load if I have that on) and DuckDuckGo onionized on Tor mostly. I also need to use AlpaFold for work, but fortunately we have an instance that doesn’t go to Google’s servers. They created the protein folding technology and the instance and scripts had to be downloaded at some point from their servers. Degoogling is a fairly complex today. I have been reading more and more about digital cooperativism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative) and even though something may be open source, as expected, companies can still profit off of it. From the sounds of it, when it comes to cooperativism, no one person controls everything or profits. You may know more about this any how. All that said, giving people more digital privacy and protection is not a technological issue, but more of social issue. Hopefully people get more informed and interested in their digital rights in the future and society moves away from the likes of Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple (and OpenAI) at large.

If I have a project, I often prefer to read up on how to accomplish the task, such as going to blog posts or getting to the source documentation. If that is not possible, I use yewtu.be (it can be slow to load just FYI). There is also PeerTube, but it doesn’t have as much content. Lastly, there is FreeTube, which is built on YouTubes API and gives them revenue in some way, but doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t allow Google to learn your behavior or target you for ads. I also use a VPN (with DNS protection enabled) when loading anything. If you’re degoogling (as I and many have done), one other item I hear people say they have difficulty dropping is Google Maps. I know you didn’t ask about it, but just to add, other options exist, such as Open Street Maps (OSM), Organic Maps, CoMaps, Magic Earth (I think may be built on Google Maps API, but not entirely sure), and Kagi (I’m fairly sure it uses Apple Maps and Google Maps API). Also, I have just started looking into FlockHopper, but I’m not sure what it is built on, I think OSM and MapBox (not sure if I have that right), but I’m not sure. Also MapQuest still exists.

Not terribly interested in this video platform as I also don’t use YouTube. I really hope Google gets broken up and I don’t like them harvesting my data and selling it to the US Government any more than I like companies like Bytedance selling my data to the Chinese Government. I am in the US and think we should have established data privacy and data protection laws long before things got to the point they have gotten too.

Sounds like a desperate attempt to convince investors that there is growing user engagement by decreasing the amount of time needed for a video to be considered engaging. Must be that people are moving through shorts at breakneck speeds. I haven’t touched YouTube in many years as the platform turned into one giant ad service (even if you pay for to remove ads). I guess that is what Google is primarily anyway, a company aiming to serve personalized (maybe also behavioral) ad to people.

I like that Google is slowly killing their own business model. Increasing costs for websites as they are getting an increase in bots crawling them, without directing actual humans to those sites and not paying those site owners (with some exceptions like Reddit) anything. It’s just making it even more difficult for small websites to grow as the crawlers increase burdens like energy costs, but without sending traffic or payment. I don’t use Google services any more and haven’t in a long time. Highly recommend people move away from them.

It would probably be hated even more as all of those points would be magnitudes higher in volume than they are today. It’s what is wanted by corporations, a cheap surveillance tool that closely monitors everyone to keep everyone in line. There are multiple dimensions to this issue. I think AI should have stayed in R&D for a while longer. It is so half baked, but unfortunately trusted as an “expert” by people who may not be familiar with hunting down primary trustworthy sources. Though that last point is nothing new. I think it should have never been used for things like scanning private/personal files or to accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit. These companies are buying their own bullshit and are trusting/betting on AI to reduce the most costly component of their company, the labor force. It’s all just smoke and mirrors though, always has been. It’s not like these things are gods among us, but they are sold that way. In the end, not matter what, with the current state of AI or if they were cheaper to use computationally, the bubble will burst. At least when that happens, maybe some of the left overs can be repurposed for actual useful things for society, but I don’t have my hopes up at the moment.

Been using DDG for years now, and have since turned off AI. My only issue with DDG, StartPage, and Ecosia, is that they don’t do their own indexing (AFAIK). I still use them, but have been looking into Kagi and Brave (I know they have their own issues as well) as I think they index independently of Google or Microsoft. With not having an independent index, then the search engine is at the mercy of the companies that do. Such as is Google wants to remove or deprioritize something, it would also be seen in StartPage. Again, that my understanding and it may be wrong.

Me too, but Google pays billions to push Chrome as the default on devices. I think Google and Microsoft are awful companies nowadays. Chrome and Edge are basically spyware now. So are Google search and Bing. There are others, but for example Mozilla gets boatloads of money from Google to exist, Brave has had some privacy issue (AFAIK), and so have others had their share of problems or over reliance on Google or Microsoft. I use DuckDuckGo as my browser, but have been starting to use Tor more to keep up with preventing advertiser from tracking using digitally fingerprinting. DDG or StartPage for search are unfortunately both reliant on Microsoft and Google indexing, respectively, unfortunately. Kagi may be an option, but they don’t have a browser yet. Anyway, there are so many topics on this that I could go on and on.

Post-Google search can’t come soon enough. They had a good start, but are now so full of greed. Personally, I avoid Google services (at least directly and block their trackers on websites as best as I can) like the plague nowadays. Google should be broken up as they are too bloated now and are highly monopolistic.

Google needs to be broken up! The ruling from Judge Mehta a couple years ago was a travesty. I highly recommend people move away from their surveillance tools/spyware. There are other browsers, search engines, maps, video hosting websites, etc. Google is too bloated and it’s damaging to society. I would say not just break them apart, but then make some of the baby Google companies, from the breakup, utilities for everyone. Would need to sit on that last part some more though, as it probably comes with its own issues.

Also, (maybe some would argue first) might be that someone goes to prison over a thing like this.

The AI boom is really the gold boom in disguise.

For the betterment of the shareholders. :/

Edit: But seriously, what do they mean by “better”? Maybe there was potential and still is to educate people and improve critical thinking skills to assess what they are being fed instead of blindly trusting algorithmic output. Thats more of a fundamental issue than the algorithms though.

Indefinite PTO.