Hello there!
Many of you consider LBRY and Odysee as a good alternative to YouTube, because it does not track you, and does not do evil things.
Let me clear up your heads.
LBRY and Odysee still tracks you. It does still use an algorithm, that recommends you content. To be honest, it isn’t really different from YouTube. You need a phone number to verify, or other personal information. They use third-party components, to provide their services like Google AdSense. If it grows more, then we will get to the same point, what we have now with YouTube. (If they don’t make a change.)
From LBRY Inc. Privacy Policy:
How do we use your information?
We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:
To personalize your experience and to allow us to deliver the type of content and product offerings in which you are most interested. To improve our website in order to better serve you.
Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on previous visits to our site and other sites on the Internet.
Third-party links
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Finally someone speaks out about this.
If you’ve ever tried to sign-up for their rewards program, you’ll know that it does everything that Google would do.
They require that you either give them your phone number, credit card or link social media accounts.
I’m sorry what? This is supposed to be a private alternative? Not only that, but you can literally do all of these steps and still get declined.
The last step being extremely creepy as they want you to link all of your social medias and hand them over on a silver plate for “verification purposes”.
Some might argue that you don’t need to opt-in to their rewards program but the point of being a YouTube alternative is that creators can get paid for their work.
Do not sign up, do not give these guys your personal information for “verification” and please do not trust a project just because it’s open source: it can still harvest your data as a proprietary website and application would (LBRY/Odysee being a perfect example of this).
Opt for Peertube (https://joinpeertube.org/) instead.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that they decline all verification attempts that are done using a VPN or proxy, but they only tell you this AFTER you’ve done the verification and handed over your personal information. Private alternative my ass.