[ferzul]

in the olden days, i could walk into a newsagent/video shop, pick up a product, exchange some plesantries, put down some coins, and walk out. no-one would know my name or anything about me.

nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.

there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.

the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.

one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.

NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.

If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.

[drbacon]

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate it, ferzul.

I 100% agree that personal data has unfortunately found its way into a transaction in which it should not belong. I respect the fact that you push back on this point, though I do find "treat them like hostiles" as an extreme position. Other entities offer transactions that I find abhorrent, and I simply just refuse to interact with them.

If paying for physical media (be it movies or newspapers or anything else) with "coins" is still valuable to you, I encourage you to continue to practice that behavior, and encourage others as well. It is still mostly possible in many cases.

> ...Google actively requires you to trust them... ... I shouldn't have to trust corporations.

Regarding YouTube, you can still interact with them in a trustless environment. Browse in incognito mode in a non-Google browser. Google gets to show an ad to an anonymous user and you get to watch a video. End of transaction.