this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Sorry, my sensors for irony, sarcasm and satire have been severely damaged by 2025. Please, puh-leaaase tell me this is!
Nope... This is a person actively choosing comfort over morals and over actual safety.
I don't see myself as a target, and I don't live in the United States.
We are all targets for data capture. We might not see how it affects us, but it does. It's a big part of the reason why everything is going to shit. Why the worst people are reaching for absolute power everywhere, your area is not immune either. Unless something changes technology will allow the worst people to seize power and affix themselves in there.
I used Google since I was a kid, so their products have been a part of my life for a long time. I don’t see myself not using YouTube.
You pick the platforms and pick what you share on each of them, be careful now what you say.
"My parents were a bunch of homophobic racists, so it's OK for me to be a bigot today."
"I grew up with domestic violence, so beating up my kids is just my way of being nostalgic."
These statements sound insane, don't they? Well, they're perfectly analogous to what you said. You're making it sound as if growing up with something makes it an immutable fact of one's life. They aren't. As we obtain better judgement of the world around us, we can grow out of things just like we once grew into them.
Google has been a terrible company for a long time now, and recently it has even become an active supporter of the fascist regime trying to establish itself in the U.S.
I'm not saying decoupling from the big tech oligopolies is easy; it isn't. But not even making a conscious effort to even try, that amounts to being complicit in, if not supportive of the fascist takeover.
Your choices matter. Make them count.
I already miss out on basically everything that happens in my town because it's all shared and done on Facebook. I'm fine with that, whatever, I don't really care, but Google services are much harder for me to decouple from. I will admit that YouTube is the strongest vice in my life, I just can't get enough of it. I also feel it's too late, I've shared my stuff with Google, uploaded tax shit to get AdSense to work, had a channel, bought domains, used Gemini for a long time, and more spanning years of my life since childhood. Google's got my data by the balls. I think it's a bit too late for me.