YouTube Premium is the only media subscription I pay for because it's the only one I consider worth it. I watch an unhealthy amount of YT, listen to tons of music, and even use YT as a kind of cloud storage for thousands of hours of recorded video.
Sorry for the down votes, you're 100% valid. YouTube Premium benefits me and the content creators I watch. Sure, it's more complicated than that, but everything is, and sometimes you just have to make choices that make your life a little easier.
I’d probably be paying for YouTube, if it were run by a normal media company instead of the world’s largest spy network and personal data broker. There’s no way in hell I’m giving them my credit card information.
Yeah I don't really care about value when it comes to giving money to the guys who work with the NSA and CIA to find ways to more thoroughly spy on every user 24/7, and turned every search into "You asked for x, here's a dozen pages of what the State Department thinks you should have searched for instead"
I exaggerated for effect, in the way that 99% sure might as well be a fact in this case:
I have never given them to YouTube, and they have no financial incentive to acquire them AFAIK - holding that kind of PI is a liability so if anything they wouldn't want it without having a need for it. YouTube can't even know what countries I live in, my digital identity from the POV of their servers is too fluid and non-unique for my viewing habits to meaningfully correlate; I blend in with many other people also trying to stay hidden from them.
As for other Alphabet companies, like those engaged in surveillance capitalism who want to scoop up all of the datas, it's theoretically possible they've illegally acquired them from third parties and found a use for it, but there's just no feasible way they could associate that with most of my online activities, say, this account I'm using. The only people who have a chance at that are certain state intelligence agencies who are eavesdropping the wires, and they have much bigger problems they're paid to worry about. Hell, unless things have gotten better for them since Snowden, even they might struggle - most of their super cool hacker shit is only really useful if someone's worth active targeting.
Personally, considering I can get it for free, and that Google bad, $22 is a bad deal for me. I'd rather donate $20 to the groups helping us get around it, and spend the other $2 on jawbreakers!
Yeah but my aging parents can't, it's about effort. Of course I could set up something that gets around all of it but then I still have to pay for their music streaming on their phone. And the second something breaks I'm not with them to fix it.