Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. I asked a question back in March: can a user-hostile leopard change its spots? I was cautiously, skeptically willing to entertain the possibility. Microsoft had made noises about pulling Copilot back from its most obnoxious outposts. Pavan Davuluri said some words. I...

There's a thing that happens to me regularly that I suspect happens to you too. I'm trying to get to a site — reading an article, buying something, just clicking around — and suddenly I'm not going anywhere until I've proven my humanity to Google. Traffic lights. Buses. Motorcycles. And at least once, a traffic light...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's be honest about something first. Google has always collected everything — your searches, your location, your watch history, what you hovered over, how long you paused. That's not news, and if you're reading this series it's not a surprise. But Google has also, in...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. There's a thing called the Global Privacy Control. GPC. It's a signal your browser can send that tells websites, in plain technical terms: do not sell or share my data. The California Attorney General endorses it. It's legally required to be honored under CCPA. It's...

YouTube built something fun. The lawyers already knew what it was. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. YouTube announced something fun yesterday. No really. Genuinely fun on the surface. You can now create an AI avatar of yourself for use in Shorts. Record a quick selfie, read a few prompts so it can...

I've now written two posts about YouTube systematically degrading its free experience — background playback killed in browsers, lyrics paywalled after six years of being free. Each time I've said: this is a pattern, not a coincidence. This is deliberate, not incidental. So let's talk about what else has been going on,...

Four days ago, I wrote about YouTube killing background playback in browsers and how it was part of a broader pattern of systematically degrading free features to push people toward Premium subscriptions or their data-slurping app. Guess what happened this week? YouTube Music just put song lyrics behind a paywall. The...

Remember when you could open YouTube in Samsung Internet or Brave, lock your screen, and keep listening to music or podcasts while doing literally anything else on your phone? Yeah, that's done. As of this week, YouTube officially killed background playback through third-party browsers. No more workarounds. No more...