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YouTube screwing itself with adblockers again (beehaw.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I "don't have watch history turned on". Okay, fine. I won't be able to browse suggested videos, and I'll spend less time on their platform.

Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I'm having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.

Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.

Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I'm subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.

To summarize; Now I'm watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they're collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.

Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't have my adblocker on and I get the "Your YouTube history is off" message. I cleared my cookies specifically for YouTube and Google. I still get that message.

When I go to Private mode in Firefox, the message disappears. Same thing happens when I change my User Agent in Developer Mode and changing device size.

Makes me wonder how they are specifying my non private tabs...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There’s a small army of cookies and local storage data on any of their sites. Private tabs are devoid of cookies and storage data on initial launch which starts YouTube in its default state. Unless you’re clearing cookies and storage every time you visit YouTube they’ll track you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you for the information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

If you are unique, and keep browsing with the same set of parameters, then they can track you (any web, not just YouTube).

Private tabs tweak some of those parameters to make you appear less unique, so webs have a lower confidence in you being the same person, are less likely to correlate that tab with your actual browsing habits, and less likely to punish you for "past transgressions" like having used an ad blocker.

Private tabs also clear up any data stored in your browser by a given website when you close them (not just cookies or site data, but also whether it has some fonts or tracking pixels in its cache), usually have fewer extensions enabled (each extension and data stored in it can make you more unique), and so on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you for the information and the link.

Edit: I just ran this. This site basically says I am unique because of I updated my OS on my old computer. There are a lot of other factors but those are the main ones. This is so interesting. I'm gonna do more research on how to mess these variables up. Thank you very much for this. Bookmarked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This site basically says I am unique because of I updated my OS

The site is more for illustrative purposes, since they don't have nearly close the same amount of users as large sites like YouTube, and there is no way to know which data points exactly does some website take into account at any given moment or to what level... but you can export the results and compare them between devices, places, over time, or try to mess with them, like you said.