That's one of the reasons I never use YouTube itself. I use Invidious which is a private "front end" that allows me to watch YouTube videos without anybody collecting my data at all. On a good day it also lets me download the videos. I've also never seen an ad there, unless the ad is part of the video itself.
Downside is that you can't have an account, so you can't post comments, upload videos, make playlists, follow people, etc. That doesn't bother me much personally.
The other downside is that Google hates Invidious because it kills their ads and tracking, so they're always monkeying about with their own code to kill Invidious. Sometimes Invidious stops working because of that, but it's never been very long before Invidious recovers, and most of the time it just works.
It has many "instances" to choose from (different URLs), but they're all much the same thing. This is the one I'm using at the moment:
https://invidious.drgns.space/feed/popular
If Google messes up the instance I'm using, I click the "switch instance" button until I get one that works, though if I'm not in a hurry I just wait till it's fixed.
There's a browser plugin called Privacy Redirect that automatically redirects YouTube URLs to Invidious, if you can be bothered configure it to do that.
23 Mar 2024, 11:00 pm
