I'm a little fucked off with YouTube because I recently decided to try out a VPN. And whilst I had the VPN up, YouTube refused to play anything unless I logged into a YouTube account.
Google makes money from scraping as much of our data as it can, and if we attempt to conceal ourselves for privacy via a VPN, Google makes less money. So it punishes us by denying access. Apparently it's not enough that it still gets paid for all the adverts it throws at us attached to the content.
This is the shit future. You want something, you have to sign away your rights. I need to buy a new car soon, and I've read
Mozilla Foundation's review of cars, and I don't want a new car. This isn't fucking okay. My car,
my property, that I bought, should not be a vehicle (pun intended) for some **** corporation to hijack as it feels like so it can scrape details from my personal life to sell on for their profit. The modern world is the tech industry subverting your ownership. We've paid our money, and yet these utter fucking shits have granted themselves permission to reach in and control our property in ways that undermine the concept of ownership.
And the argument that if you don't like it you shouldn't buy it is bullshit if all the companies do it. "You can't have a car unless you sign away your privacy" is utterly absurd. There's nothing about a car that means you should have to let the manufacturer collect information on you for its lifespan. The only alternative being "don't have a (modern) car" is not reasonable.
Back at Davos years ago someone made this argument about us not owning in the future, we rent everything. Don't own a car, or a house, or whatever, just rent as you need it. This could be consumer-focused, liberating. Corporations however are offering us the dark side of this future, that definitely isn't for our benefit. A world where they manage to carry on gouging us for monthly fees even after we've purchased something, which they can change the rules on as they feel life - even making products worse than when bought them, and potentially demanding higher rents if we want them back. A future of shitty rent: not rent we freely choose to have things for our betterment, but rent maliciously extracted from us under threat of disadvantage.
