'Pay to remove ads' is such an awful insidious now common phrase. Give us money or else we'll do this to you. If you don't pay us, we will control your experience. We will force ourselves upon you unless you meet our demands. Modern day protection racket.

@TheBreadmonkey

When did capitalism become extortion?

When they removed all competition buying, bribing or even a hostile overthrow.

@SCALETHEORY @TheBreadmonkey
Ad blockers only deal with the superficial stuff. Google has been using centralised fonts as trackers since 2010 and as a result I'm pretty wary of the google webp image format.
EFF.org has a lot of good articles about steps you can take to protect your privacy.

@Theriac @TheBreadmonkey

Thanks for reference, EFF. Never used google anything since they began 98ish and couldn't remove one of their apps I downloaded. Never used my real name or any real data, (wrong dates, numbers, etc) so they can have what ever they want for their skewed data.

I used a VPN, doesn't let you on some sites in this now dystopian internet they're killing with greed.
If they were good people we could have a better internet and they'd actually make even more than they are.