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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

When using such federated platforms, do you leak your IP address to other people viewing the content?

For Peertube specifically yes, if you're seeding it (opt-out if your browser supports it).

However, this concern is mitigated because Peertube uses open standards, so it's very easy to use various proxying services for privacy concerns. It's unlikely that any such 3rd party clients will ever get blocked.

Comparing to Youtube: a single malevolent company tracks everyone's actions for nefarious purposes, purposefully changes internal "protocol" regularly to break 3rd party clients (youtube-dl, Newpipe) and blocks scrapers and other archival systems.

Overall, Peertube has much more privacy-friendly capabilities than Youtube ever will have.

Yes, It currently displays the following warning:

> Friendly Reminder: the sharing system used for this video implies that some technical information about your system (such as a public IP address) can be sent to other peers.

GitHub issue upon which this banner was decided upon[1]

[1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/316

If WebRTC is activated in your browser and webtorrent (https://webtorrent.io/) is being used by the instance, yes. However, you could say the same for Zoom or most video calling platform, if I'm not mistaken.

Most video calling platforms only expose you to the actual people you are calling which is generally a non issue. Torrents have a public list of all content and all hosts with what content they hold. This is required for peer discovery and it means that a malicious party can just suck up the whole DHT and create a database of every video each IP address watched.

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