alt-text
A screenshot of a YouTube video embedded in a news article where YouTube is throwing the error “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. This helps protect our community.” Stitched below is a screen grab from Avengers Endgame where Captain America says, “no, I don’t think I will.”
Can’t use YouTube with my VPN without signing in
Freetube desktop app works well.
It’s more of a me problem as I don’t like installing more apps than needed, I just use Firefox for watching YouTube or download the videos to watch later with yt-dlp. Both of these methods need me to disconnect the VPN
Minimizing installed apps does help in some ways with security (idk your personal reason) but I prefer to never even render Google pages directly because of all the embedded trackers and the browser fingerprinting vector.
Startpage > anonymous view
I might be wrong, but it seems like creating new accounts & using new emails or at least email forwarding services should help protect our privacy a little bit.
And some thoughts about like five people:
I feel bad YouTube is punishing YouTube Premium users who wanted to do a couple searches about finding divorce lawyers or birthday gifts to buy their kids while maintaining some privacy for a couple moments. Bet if Proton bought them they would implement some URL parameter you could pass or something.