Never heard of Wireguard, so I went to their website and for a half second. I thought I cracked the screen on my new phone, because of their freaking background image....
But, it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out more.
I no longer use any of Google's services and neither does my employer for this reason.
We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...
Companies push their own apps for control. They are very limited on the types of metrics and tracking that can be done through the browser. By pushing their own apps they become limited only by the operating system itself.
I would agree that advertisement has done a lot of damage. However, there have been a lot of really awesome things that could not have happened without it. Like YouTubers for example, so many people are able to make a living making content they love and people love to watch. I say that as many of them are now having to turn to things like patreon because advertisement is now hurting them...
"I really need to get this deployed to production. I'll remove the warning debugging flag and build it... AH MAN look at all these unused import error!! Screw it! I don't have time to fix them all. I'll just add it bad and fix it later"
I was still working in the security field (MSSP SOC) when Coinhive came out. It quickly because one of the prominent "threats" we had to deal with. All of our clients wanted any site that had Coinhive on it, whether or not the site owners added it or criminals did, blocked. It was view by nearly everyone in cyber security, including AV companies, as malware. It got a bad reputation because many sites didn't allow you to opt-in, and many didn't even tell you they were running it.
I don't think you would have to re-host everything. One could place a placeholder (image maybe) instead of the embedded content that says "Click to activate third party resource. Caution, it may not respect DNT". Than if they click, swap it out with the youtube video or whatever. Gives them the choice to choose what they want to do.
This article scares me more than any horror movie ever has. I'm currently the sole provider for my family (thankfully, this will change in a few weeks), and even though I have a decently stable job that pays well. Losing it and not being able to get another is my worse nightmare (right after burning alive).
I know it shouldn't bother me this much. I have had 7 interviews in my life and I only failed 2 of them. One of them being back in high school when I applied to Pepsi for stocking shelves.
I know that if I would to ever actually end up in that kind of position, it would most likely be because of feared it so much that I made it happen to myself.
But, it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out more.