618
YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household
(www.androidpolice.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
618 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
74736 readers
2512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Meanwhile I installed the User Agent Switcher extension for firefox to change my user agent every 30 seconds to something random to avoid tracking. A few websites don’t accept it. I just quit those websites and find a non-billionaire-owned alternative like Kagi or Fastmail. So far it’s working out well.
That likely makes you easier to track. User agents don't really matter all that much if an advanced tracking script is used. When your IP address is the same, your browser engine is the same, your canvas data stays the same, your window size stays the same, your operating system stays the same, then they will just know that you also use an extension that makes your user agent not reflect your system and track you based on that too.
Use Mullvad Browser without changing anything important (change the default search engine at most) and preferably use a proper VPN to actually avoid tracking during regular internet usage. Or use LibreWolf to at least fool naive scripts.
I would suggest reading this too:
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/3.3-Overrides-%5BTo-RFP-or-Not%5D
How is that easier? That’s just only very slightly harder, not easier. Most sites will not have such sophisticated logic. And anyway, the purpose is to suss out which websites do this kind of tracking and avoid them entirely, not to thwart the tracking.
Technically, yes, most sites won't have such sophisticated logic. But any Google, Microsoft, or Meta service you use most definitely will.
I really liked CreepJS's "Visits" feature where it would show a counter for how many people have visited with exactly the same browser fingerprint (which would usually be 1 unless you were using Tor Browser or Mullvad Browser), but they seem to have removed it for some reason along with "Lies" and "Trust Score". You can still check it out here though to see just how much identifying information even a simple hobby project can gather in less than a second.
That’s a good example of why the goal should be to find services which are less intrusive and less monitoring heavy.
I don't think there are any services that can compare to YouTube in any way.