John Oliver - Data Brokers

It’s totally possible! I live in CO and Comcast had a legal monopoly per state law. Nobody else is allowed to compete with their cable service. But you know what isn’t cable? Fiber! A local broadband company just installed fiber in my neighborhood this spring. I signed up for $89/mo gigabit service, no data cap, no installation fees at all. Between when I signed up and when they turned on service, they upgraded my service to 1.2 gigabit, same monthly price, no cap, no commitment, no upsell (their only other service is rural satellite Internet).

I talked to the technician installing it and he said they aren’t getting any subsidies from anyone. Not the city, state, or fed. It’s simply economically viable to run new gigabit fiber for $89/mo. All it takes is a company that can make the initial infrastructure investment.

Their game is just to try to make the ISPs liable; they don’t actually want it enforced. In fact, failure to enforce is the feature. They paint the ISP as complicit in the piracy then sue the ISP for hundreds of millions in damages hoping for a no-fault settlement. That’s a much better revenue stream than suing someone for 10k who can’t pay it.

It’s not even that simple. If you skip ahead during an ad, the YT servers could just keep streaming you the ad content anyway. Their servers can ensure that the next 30s of packet data you receive is an ad no matter what, so the only way you can skip it is to wait it out and close your ears and eyes. Basically the same concept as ads on broadcast TV. Which means we’ll have to do a TiVo for YT… Gross.

It’s pedantic, but you are not your computer. They don’t collect (according to them) PII other than phone numbers.

• Your Device’s Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), - absolutely necessary for anti-ddos techniques
• browser type, browser version, - necessary for UX to build a functional website for the browsers that customers actually use
• the pages of our Service that You visit, the time and date of Your visit, the time spent on those pages, - critical for determining what is popular and what isn’t to improve how the interface is designed and what parts are pulled forward and what parts are hidden in menus
• unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data. - useful for determining how often you switch devices and the performance and other experience metrics to drive making the app more user friendly

I work on web software professionally and this is a pretty minimal list that is completely justifiable for maintaining operations. If you can’t answer basic questions like “what are users doing with the app?”, you can’t make intelligent decisions about how to improve it.

There’s a lot of the same stuff here: https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/

I don’t know anything about this app or company so I’m not going to defend them, but there aren’t any real red flags here. If this amount of data collection bothers you, you really should stop using the internet in general.

They were just trying to protect everyone from dihydrogen monoxide poisoning. Bibi saw a Facebook post about its dangers.

Destin works for defense contractors and he’s never been shy about his interest and involvement in weaponry. He has a bible quote at the end of his videos. I seriously doubt I would agree with him about pretty much any politics and definitely not his personal beliefs, but he keeps his channel pretty strongly focused on the episode’s subject without bringing his personal views into it. He seems to do the channel because he likes geeking out about nerdy stuff and wants to share that love with others.

I personally feel that the knowledge he’s sharing is more important than knowing we probably disagree on some things. If he starts including prayer time or turns his channel into military porn, I’m out. But his channel is a positive influence for now, IMO.

Rober is different. He acts like cool science bro that worked for NASA and wants you to think he’s Bill Nye or something. But he seems to be doing it for views and to push the stuff he’s selling. He doesn’t seem genuine. He’s at risk of turning into a prank bro channel if his quality goes downhill.

They’re bots