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145

YouTube screwing itself with adblockers again (beehaw.org)

submitted 9 months ago by TheBaldness@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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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[–] IllNess@infosec.pub 7 points 9 months ago (5 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...

[–] toodd@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 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.

[–] IllNess@infosec.pub 1 points 9 months ago

Thank you for the information.

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