"the popup somehow also evaded my uBo filters 7 times before it stayed gone." - it's supposed to be only shown once in lifetime. May be ublock interracted with it in an unxepected way. sorry.

Sorry the message about new features bothered you.

The extension is actually recommended by Mozilla, so they do not consider it harmful or dangerous.

It’s shown only once during the lifetime of the extension, and it’s timed to appear after a browser restart - hopefully the least disruptive moment.

Handling YouTube-scale traffic and storing dozens of terabytes of like/dislike data on a school-lunch budget ain’t that easy. The funding from these features is what keeps RYD’s servers running.

And as for the permissions:

RYD hasn’t changed how it handles your data. What changed is how Mozilla labels these permissions - not what the extension does with your data.

RYD only uses the data needed to display dislikes and count votes.

Its site permissions cover YouTube and its own API at returnyoutubedislikeapi.com. RYD doesn’t read other websites, and these site permissions cannot be used to access them.

Here’s what those permissions mean:

Personally identifiable information - RYD’s randomly generated, anonymous user ID, used to count votes. This isn’t your Google or YouTube account.

Browsing activity - opening the next YouTube video, so the extension can send its video ID and fetch the new dislike count.

Website content - things like the visible like count, which helps calculate dislike estimates.

Website activity - clicking Like or Dislike.

Again, this is about YouTube activity. The extension isn’t watching everything you do across the internet - it simply can’t do that with these site permissions.

Those new labels can sound scary, but they don’t let the extension access any more websites.

RYD is open source, so you can see how it works: https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike