You don't need to use the service. But at the same time if you have an understanding that their business model demands you accept their terms of service, so th

You don't need to use the service. But at the same time if you have an understanding that their business model demands you accept their terms of service, so they can fund the product, your basic options are participating or not. The vast vast majority of the time I watch YouTube it's via an official client, and if you feel so strongly about your privacy I'm sure you're knowledgeable enough to sandbox your browser. You can always spin up a VM just for YouTube and run Chrome inside of that. I rarely download public domain videos for music projects. But this gets harder every week. Eventually I'll just have to grab my phone with an analog audio jack and manually record back into my computer. Or just download the public domain videos from another site. Yt-dl makes this phenomenally easier, but I definitely understand YouTube's motivations in blocking it.