Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
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Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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My solution to this problem (which is only tangentially related to your technical question) is to block everything and really make an effort to donate to all developers of my open source programs, content creators, website hosters etc. in the services themselves or on platforms like Liberapay/Patreon.
Sorry that I cannot help with the technical stuff but maybe an idea if you don't manage it your way.
That is great! But can I ask how much do you donate? I feel that if I try to donate to all the creators that I use the tools they develop or consume the content they create, this expense will bypass my rent (unless I will give everyone a really, really small donation).
Talking on the YouTube front, a trivially small donation will support them far more than watching ads ever could. Even something as small as $1/year is often far more than they would ever make from you in a year. As far as donations to developers go, it depends entirely on what you feel comfortable with. Most people who work on open source projects are unpaid volunteers, so it isn't expected that you donate, but if you choose to do so it can be quite helpful to sustaining the project. If many people in the userbase were to make small donations, that would go a long way.
In reality, ads almost entirely benefit exploitative multi-billion dollar companies such as Google and Facebook, so my personal philosophy stands against them. I much prefer donating to people directly to cut out the exploitative middle-man.
I was going to write exactly that. I have a channel with tens of thousands of subs, and a $1 donation from a single user generates more income than multiple ads to that same user. Patreon, or a straight-up donation (of any amount), is so much better than suffering through ads.
Ads kill content, it disrespects users, it steals attention away from what you've created, builds frustration and breaks the flow of your content, and they serve only to benefit Google & partners.
But if YouTube doesn't earn enough how will they be able to maintain the site? Agree that they can earn a little less but for some reason it doesn't work that way (I'm not aware of a service of such scale which keep profit at minimum) 🤷
Maybe you could donate a small donation to multiple projects/creators every month? Even 1$ per month is 12$ a year per project which is of course better than nothing
Yeah, that's what I haven't figured out yet either. How do you make it a fair amount between a content creator and an email client developer, between one person, a corporation and a non-profit?
I have settled on not trying to make it a science. I can only give what I have, so always when I feel that I have financial breathing room (paycheck comes in and no urgent payments due) I am going to the relevant places and donate what I feel I can afford. While not perfect, I feel I should be proud about doing what I can rather than beat myself up over whether I could spend more, which a lot of free users will never think about in the first place. Otherwise I'd only go crazy.
The donations will go to what/who I feel like I have used/appreciated most since the last donations. So it's mainly donations, not subscriptions which also helps not losing track and giving more than you can afford. Come to think of it, I also do not donate to the big creators whose content I consume as I guess they are rich enough. If you want a number, my last donation was 20€ to a small ASMR content creator. And for stuff that I use regularly like programs and apps (e.g. NewPipe 4€/month and KeePass 0.5€), my OS (3€), the hoster of the Piped instance I use (4€) etc. I have set up regular payments on Liberapay and such according to their tier system. I cannot afford all that much, so I am going for the small/medium tier according to my amount of usage (and I guess you should think about if they have running costs or not). If you are not constrained by money I guess you can just go for their higher tiers and vary them according to usage.
I realise it does sound like a pretty bad science now as it's both complicated and does not sound fair at all (e.g. OS gets too little, no?), but well… This write-up actually helped me understand my own 'system' better, so thanks for asking! :)