You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.

Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced.
Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others.
Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube.. You get the point.

You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.

For now. Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.

Guy uses phone number for business, shocked when it gets listed for that business. More at 11.

that's a problem too, but the discussion was about interacting with google. fuck them for showing ads down our throats, but at least they don't know who watches the video (when using a proxy like invidious), and so they can't build a profile of you, and they can't bombard you with tailored manipulative ads either, just something possibly totally irrelevant.

Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all

I explicitely did not claim that.

And as the other guy said, you don't need a G account to watch youtube.

Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.

Enshittification is guaranteed even for the paid tier.

Maybe there'll be silver, gold and platinum memberships next. How long til you realize you've been had?

Those pesky "We have updated our privacy policy" emails. And "by ignoring this message you have signaled consent" (paraphrasing).

People should really start demanding more sensible terms. Currently, people just don’t care, and companies are taking full advantage of the situation.

I wonder if it’s possible to specifically exclude your business/website/project from google search. Surely that must be something you can legally do.

Except he provided it for identify verification, and if I was asked for this my assumption would be they need a mobile number to send a verification text message. If Google wanted a business number in order to publish it online they should state that clearly.

I understand the story is about google adding a guy's number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven't seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra to be unlisted. If you didn't want to look somebody up in the book you could dial a number and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and didn't bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?

The author suggests it was added through people answering the "is this a business" prompts on their phones, not the identity verification.

Its weird how more people decided to use this information against people in the modern era than people in the past.

All the content i watch gets age locked because youtube is run by prudes.

Well I mean you had to go the the kitchen and then look around in the cabinet for the yellow pages. Then you would realize you had five of them, and would say "why the hell do we have five phone books?" Then you'd their out the old ones, only to realize they were all outdated. Then you'd ask your family if they knew where the current one is, and it turns out that it's propping up the short end of the old couch in the basement. Then you'd need to go get it, but since somebody dumped old leftovers in the trash (this was before recycling) they're all gross. So you had to go grab a suitably thick replacement, and figure that the table of contents book from the 1982 encyclopedia set you've always had would work. You after your 3rd trip up and down the stairs you've finally got the phone book but can't remember why, but while you have it you decide to order a pizza, then throw the book in the cabinet where they go. Two days later you find the phone number you needed in the first place, written on the back of an envelope.

Yes, I remember these (they also send a map of the city with all the street and public transportation lines)

But the point is that you can be unlisted from these (and as far as I remember it was free). Not sure about the part where you can call an operator that tell you the number you are looking for.

Anyway, the problem is that Google seems to have shared the phone number even if the user declined to do so (and by the user account, the number was not listed for years). This just seems a move from Google that show a total disperect of the user decision.

except people who paid extra to be unlisted

With social media, e-mail, and the rest of it "out there" people have started assuming that "unlisted" is the default for voice phones now. Also, in those "good old days" of the ubiquitous phone books, the listings were mostly land-lines, and mobile phones were unlisted by default. Because of the rates charged for mobile calls in the dying days of the white pages, there were even special laws regarding unsolicited calls to your mobile phone.

It used to be difficult AND expensive to get an unlisted domain name as well, but that has been evolving and now it's a no-cost checkbox option when registering whether you want your contact info to be listed with the domain ownership or not.

Times do change, and while we are generally more exposed than ever, I believe the shifts to more "private by default" configurations of our contact info are a good thing.

In the US the "standard" low cost line was listed in the white pages by default, you effectively paid extra - per month - for an unlisted number.

The operator information was basically a phone company employee reading the white pages info to you, for a fee.

It was used against people in the past too, probably more underreported then than now.

So, all you have to do to "out" anyone who ever talks to you on the phone is mis-inform Google that the number is a business and "boom" they're out there.

Makes one want to start using callerID spoofing as a regular practice. I am calling from 212-555-1212.