tal , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

It was pointed out to me that I watched more YouTube than any other streaming service which I was paying for.

Yeah, I think that YouTube provides a lot of value.

My problem is that I don’t really want Google – a company who makes a lot of their money via profiling and data-mining – logging and data-mining everything I watch.

YouTube Premium lets someone avoid ads. But as best I can tell, it’s not buying any kind of no-log service – in fact, it’s just linking your activity to your financial information, which makes logging and profiling easier. That’s not the service that I want to buy from Google.

What I’d be willing to get from Google is a “no log” service.

I pay for Kagi, for search engine service. I pay for commercial email service. I’m fine with giving money to online service providers and entrusting them with (some) of my data…but I want part of that service to be that they aren’t logging what I do and data-mining my data.

I don’t like the model of “we don’t charge up front but we make our money by extracting all the information about you that we can”. I’m fine with that existing, because some people are more comfortable with that. But it isn’t what I want for myself.