tmpUserA

Is there a single time in tech history where a monopoly was not totally abused ? You are asking Apple to take over the world because you buy their privacy propaganda but ICloud is not even end2end encrypted, employee are listening to Siri conversation, Apple knows all apps you run and when instead of just providing a blacklist you compare against locally... There's a scandal every month about Apple privacy.

How long before they ban ProtonMail because "You know what, we think our emails are "better for you". How long before they ban Signal because "You know what, IMessage has a better security than signal so it's "better for you".

Monopoly / tech dictatorship are the easy and tempting solution but nothing good ever came out of giving some dude total power over you. And even if you like those dude because you buy their propaganda, many other people might not share your view.

Yes, even if you are careful about Privacy, your friends will betray you by adding your data (phone, photos, etc.) to big tech services

Even if you never touched Google/Facebook in your life, they have your number and many other data about you via other persons

Even if you never touched an Apple device in your life, they already have done Facial Recognition on you because your friends took a photo of you and tagged you (see the creepy HomeKit doorbells that recognise you despite you have never agreed to facial recognition)

Laws totally fail to address that aspect of Privacy

Yes I agree

Also in a similar idea, I think PostMarketOS, LineageOS, /e/ foundation, etc. are nice for privacy minded people on the short-term, but on the long term if we want things to truly change, we have to take both hardware & software independence like PinePhone & Librem 5 are doing.

If the foundations you build upon are too hostile towards you, on the long run you'll spend all your time & money fighting them instead of achieving you original goal.

However sometimes it becomes near impossible to do your own thing. Google has infected the whole manufacturing world with their own Android HAL & specific drivers and now it's impossible to find any competitive modern SOC running standard Linux decently (with GPU, Linux drivers, etc.). Which is why PinePhone has an old crappy chip and Purism took an automobile chip for their phone. And even that might disappear as IoT/Cars/Planes/etc. are using more&more Android instead of Linux. Even Microsoft is moving to their own chip.

The situation is very sad and extremely anti-competitive, but soon, the only way to run your own platform on some modern hardware might be reverse Eng (if that's even still legal by then)

As far as I understand, to track users, website use : IP, Cookie/LocalStorage, Fingerprinting.

I wonder if youtube-dl really helps ? It doesn't change the IP, you can refuse/clear cookies in your browser, and for fingerprinting, isn't scraping via youtube-dl make you even more unique among other regular browser users ?