y helo thar?

  • 1 Post
  • 10 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 24th, 2026

help-circle

  • Pretty good!

    One small suggestion though. Remember to remove everything after the “?” when sharing links to YouTube or other platforms. The “is” (sometimes “si”, sometimes something else) is a server side tracker. When you generated that link on YT, it saved the random letters behind ‘is=‘ to a table in a database associated with your account. Now anyone you share that link with, who clicks on it will be linked to your profile behind the scenes in the data machine of Google.

    Additionally, when Google is scraping Lemmy or FB or anywhere else you drop that link it can be loosely related to your YT account. So in theory if no one else shared your link with the sharing code, it’s a strong signal to Google that werecat@lemmy.world is the same as the account that generated the tracking code.

    Hopefully that makes sense, it’s something I try and spread far and wide because it’s not well known.

    For others looking for a link without the tracker, it’s here for your convenience https://youtu.be/DlTNN0gvkLM






  • Yea, unfortunately all of every system requires some level of trust and I’m giving a big boy like Google a lot of trust their hardware is secure. But let’s say Google is clean, their schematics and chipsets are all vetted and stuff. There’s an additional layer at the fabrication of the hardware. Do you trust the Chinese hardware makers? If not then basically all devices are compromised. Need to trust the driver vendors, need to trust your ISP, need to trust your Os vendor, so on ad infinitum.

    I’m also trusting the Graphene OS devs that they’ve done their due dilligence and ensure their hardened product is up to their marketing specs. I don’t think I possess any such knowledge to know 99% of this. I could take wireshark and profile its baseline data and make some assumptions, but what if all telemetry is just stored somewhere local and like on the leap year, the code fires it all off to homebase? I’m not likely scanning and analyzing 100% of the time so like it takes trust.