I fuckin' signed in to YouTube with my existing account damn it
Trust me, Google already knows your home address.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
309 points (95.3% liked)
Privacy
37513 readers
707 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
They don't even pretend it's for security reasons and just admit it's for ads π€£
Just enter 127.0.0.1
~/
Aaaand now 1,337 other users can reset your password and steal your account.
Elite
Skip
We may not always have that option...
They use it for Google Maps as a pin. Nothing new, and not particularly weird either. You can just skip it and not tell them.
Just click skip? They just use it for traffic notifications on maps and stuff.
But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won't let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.
The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.
For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven't shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.
Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.
I was just thinking how much we've lost. Each generation grows up with this stuff being normalized by people saying "it's fine just skip it". But the early days of the internet was so much different compared to the people today.
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative "social media" like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn't suck ass like they do nowadays.
Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of "engagement" into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when "Homepage" was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it's their Instagram profile, or something like that.
This is a very long comment when they definitely already know users addresses, lol
More like asking you to confirm what they already know.
Yeah, ridiculous isn't it.
Recently validated data has more value tho
You can skip that step. Not that it's okay, tho.
For now.
Next year:
Sorry, your login looks suspicious. For your security, you've been permanently locked out of your account.
Since you never willingly gave us your address, you cannot submit a request to regain access to your account. Thank you for all the data. You cannot contact us. Have a nice day, dumbfuk
not for now, but forever. they'd be in huge trouble with EU regulations should they ever dare to change it
For now.
They already force phone numbers in the EU.
Literally every of these Google "add information xy" boxes has been skippable for years now
Phone number?
There are some people who will put this data, the ones who usually agree to all cookies. So even if you let users skip, with some dark patterns you can manage to influence a lot of people. Example: I set up local windows accounts for a couple of family members, yet somehow a week later or so they had online Microsoft accounts connected.
Puts: 123 Fake St
Hey! I live there!
Whoa. Weβre housemates!
Yeah, and they still owe us money for the electricity bill
It's been doing this for over a decade. It's used by maps to create automatic pins for home and work, for easier routing (and profit if course).
Oh? Just what I was looking for! An opportunity to be manipulated more effectively by my owners.
You can change or remove this any time...
Haha, cute.
What kind of bullshit is this?
God, I dislike Google so much. Funny to remember that once their motto used to be, "Do no evil." Ha, good times.
With your phone they already know it and where you are in every moment, if you don't desactivate GPS.
Unless you live in an apartment.
I mean this isn't new. How do you think you can say go to work or go home and have maps take you there.
It's less creepy than asking "This is your home address, isn't it?"
Yeh, not like they can't work it out.
(That said, they have no idea about my house number because I can't get them to understand the building I'm in has multiple houses in it....)
Seeing this post made me realize I have fallen for this trap already.
Yeah, pretty sure I remember clicking skip on this as many as 5 years ago. Google Maps has asked to store your home address for as long as I can remember.
Bruh, I was testing some android features and wiped an android phone, then when I tried to log in again, they wanted a verification code from the previous device, the one I just wiped. Not even will a phone number satisfy them.
Its essentially locked out, unless I get a time machine to undo wiping the phone.
I mean, what happens if someone lose their phone and wants to log in to google to wipe their device? Like... how would you obtain the verification code on a phone a thief now has?
Its just even just privacy issues, Google is braindead when it come to their "security".
Luckily, I wiped it in settings so FRP was off.
I like how you conveniently cropped out the "try another way" button:
You mean the "fuck you, go in an infinite circle" button?
Read my other comment. It leads back to the same thing.
load more comments
(5 replies)
9876 rode st., vilij, provençe 012345
view more: next βΊ