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Comment by alphabet9000 | Hacker News Reader

As someone else mentioned in the comments, the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure and i have been using it with success for weeks now.

get the extension, export the cookies.txt file to a folder, then run youtube-dl in that folder with:

youtube-dl --cookies cookies.txt https://youtu.be/id

it works as of right this minute [1] and in my experience that cookie continues to work even if you log out of your account in the browser and log back in etc

i'm trying to imagine a way to have a more permanent solution, maybe if youtube-dl provided some kind of login prompt type thing to enter some your credentials to virtually log in, although i imagine that would start to be another cat and mouse game of it working and then not working.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bga...

[1] https://i.jollo.org/ytdl.gif

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But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in. I don't want YouTube to track which videos I watch and make history-based suggestions so I never sign-in and reset cookies often. I occasionally stumble upon age-restricted videos and feel curious what's there but I don't want any of them to influence what does YouTube believe my interests are so I just use youtube-dl INSTEAD of signing-in.

And by the way, I always mostly used random birth dates whenever registering anywhere because I consider that personal information and don't want to share it. I don't even know what birth date did I set when I got my GMail back in the days it required invitations.

I don't feel like watching an age-restricted video ever again if this actually requires identification and leaves no workaround.

UPDATE: I'm actually surprised this gets down-voted.

This feels a bit overdramatic. You can remove videos from your watch history and, in my experience, YouTube will cease to give you recommendations based on them. You could also create a separate account used solely for watching videos with YouTube-dl instead of using your main one if you're worried about recommendations. I agree that it sucks that a workaround is necessary, but I don't think this particular one is worth getting too worked up about.

Does this work in practice? Most websites require text verification for accounts. With that they can just link separate accounts in the back end.

It works for me in practice. YouTube definitely are capable of linking separate accounts in the back end, but in my experience they don't do so for recommendations. I have a separate account specifically for watching a given type of content and I don't receive any of its recommendations on my main account. Now, whether or not they use linking to give advertisements or sell data I'm not sure, but at that point they can link based on IP anyway and we're talking about a separate issue.

Yeah this is a very common strategy of language learners. Have a seperate YouTube account where you only watch content in your target language to keep the recommendations clean

Maybe get a cheap MVNO SIM like Ting Mobile and use that to register?

I know I've had google accounts that didn't require any re authentication in the way of phone numbers for going on years so you can likely discard the number after you show you are human.

Won't it still also require a credit card for YouTube to believe your age?

I'm sorry, I haven't registered a new account in a while. I tested an account I've had since 2016 that I made with a ex employer's landline phone and I've never registered a credit card to. It is able to play age restricted video by confirming that I want to and nothing else. It's under a fictional name and birthday etc.

I'm born in whatever far back year forms will let me choose in most internet services, over a 100 years old in a lot of cases, I assumed everyone did this.

Three dead trolls in a baggie even made a song about it way back in early 2000s. The privacy song, just fill their database with garbage. Also I'm a 43 year old nun.

wouldn't it be better to change age/profession/etc stuff per website?

Oddly enough, it seems the internet [login forms] have created an uptick in 43 year old nuns.

The church finally has a solution to their clergy loss. ;)

Never had the patience to go all the way to the top, so I'm typically born in <couple of mouse scrolls up, random click>.

I was born in the year zero; if that breaks your database, good.

On a site like HN I assumed everybody’s birthday was Unix epoch 0

Bah, young whippersnappers.

Youtube make you submit your ID or credit card details now as proof of age.

I ran into this earlier this week when I went to watch Kung Fury, a free movie hosted on YouTube which is now age restricted. I pretty much just couldn't. Luckily the Pirate Bay exists, and now I have a permanent copy which is what I probably should've done anyway.

I guess this means I watch less YouTube, which is probably better for me in the long run. But like hell I'm signing in.

What an excellent film

maybe one solution might be to create a new youtube account in an incognito browser, and then just use the cookie from that brand new account indefinitely for youtube-dl purposes. that way, the cookie you're using in youtube-dl wouldnt be 'tied' to your real account.

I did this with another Google product and I'd be surprised if they didn't know that both accounts belong to the same person.

I am not much of a youtube-dl user (I can download fine from YouTube with a few lines of shell script) but I notice youtube-dl tries to send a "consent" cookie for every video even when not logged in. For example:

   cookie: CONSENT=YES+cb.20210328-17-p0.en+FX+203

I was going to post something very similar, as I would use it specifically to watch videos that want me to give up information and sign in. I don't find that reasonable, thus I adjust accordingly my taking these countermeasures.

You are being downvoted to suppress your well thought out information. It would be nice if HN had a public ledger of who up or down voted a post. You would click on the post and could see which usernames voted and which way. It would bring much needed transparency to combat these information suppression abuses.

"I want to maintain my privacy when watching videos."

"I think the site should publicly post a list of users who upvoted and downvoted comments that I feel were wrongly suppressed."

I had to read your comment multiple times to determine whether it was intended to be sarcastic or not.

The moment you participate in voting, you become a participant , even if your participation is really small, instead of being a pure consumer. When the internet came along, so much content has been made available without requiring accounts. Then services appeared that began auth-walling their content. Nowadays you can't even visit someone's linked in page without logging in, and there are major restrictions for places like facebook or instagram. This "must have an account with us" internet isn't the internet the world deserves. And again, requiring accounts for participation is fine. Talking about consumption only.

Not sure I agree with it, but "Exactly those actions intended to cause publicly visible changes (such as comment graying) should be subject to transparency, which anything else (such as viewing videos or comments) should be subject to privacy." seems like a prefectly self-consistent position.

And what did you determine?

> But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in.

Yes, and I want a pony. We can absolutely discuss how useful or harmful age verification on the internet is, (and your points about tracking are certainly valid) - but fact is that Google implemented it.

It is not youtube-dl's job to circumvent that. Their responsibility is letting me download the videos to my hard drive that I can already view in my browser. They never advertised themselves as a tool to circumvent access restrictions.

If the new age verification broke youtube-dl in such a way that you couldn't download the video at all, I think the outrage would be justified - but that isn't the case.

It's just FAANG being FAANG. Why make working software when you can make non-working software?

It's not about software, it's about appeasing advertisers and puritans who want to keep the children safe. It's a legal and business issue.

I don’t have a Google account and yet I watch YouTube almost daily. The algorithm still curates a feed for me so why should I have to sign up? I ran into an issue where I was not able to download an age-restricted video last week and just moved on.

Nothing Google does will make me want to create an account.

Get a second account just for yt?

"... in my experience that cookie continues to work even if you log out..."

Honest question: Should logging out invalidate the cookie for future use. If one of these cookies falls into the wrong hands it grants "evergreen" access to the account. No password needed. I have noticed this behaviour with both Gmail and Facebook. These evergreen cookies makes it very easy to check FB and mail using shell scripts without logging in, which is nice, but it seems like it should be a security issue.

>Should logging out invalidate the cookie for future use

Yes. The act of logging out implies that you want the session terminated.

> the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure

Doesn't that only work if you a) are in the EU and have verified your age or b) outside the EU?

youtube-dl does have “—-username” and “—-password” flags, or will prompt for a password if you just specify “-u”.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#authentication-option...

But as of a couple days ago it wasn’t working for age-restricted videos.

That is for HTTP auth.

Curious... Do we have any bugmenot like cookies sharing site?

this is a great idea.. i wonder how rapidly youtube cracks down on IPs being used across 1 cookie in a short period of time

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