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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

You also have to weight the benefits versus the "risk".

For example, if you use FreeTube with SponsorBlock to improve your privacy and block ads, in fact you are sending to Cloudflare 100% of your YouTube watch history, and to SponsorBlock ("sponsor.ajay.io").

With Piped instances it's even worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers.

If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.

It's easy, simple, and you have the benefits of an audited platform and that reasonably legally confirm they don't store logs unless the court forced them: "we never log their activity unless ordered by a court never log their activity unless ordered by a court", but for that, the court has to find you as a user, which can be very complicated in practice.

So much better than random strangers.

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>If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN and uBlock Origin in a loose jurisdiction and browse YouTube unlogged.

If you actually did this you would know that it works for all of a week or two before YouTube stops letting you watch videos until you login.

I found that hopping to different VPN servers is a mildly inconvenient workaround for that.

SponsorBlock doesn't send video IDs to the server.

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlockServer/issues/25

(*anymore, as of late 2020 from a quick look. The parent comment may not have been wrong about that, just outdated info)

Terrible advice. Not only youtube will precisely fingerprint you, nordvpn/tesonet/oxylab will also get data on you.

Way better than the recommended "privacy" instances.

NordVPN only sees that you connect to YouTube, they do not see the pages or videos that you are looking at, and from the perspective of YouTube, they only see requests from a very popular VPN where are millions of users.

If you use the "privacy" instances, these "privacy" websites and Cloudflare knows precisely which videos you are watching.

Recommended by whom? I'm just saying your advice is terrible in general and takes no regard to how easy and powerful fingerprinting is nowadays, in google's perspective the only difference to using that VPN if you're "just" running chrome is that it also knows when you use a VPN, in other words, just giving one more data point. Also the average user is likely to install some nordvpn app if following your advice, which is a security nightmare, remember that company sells residential proxies.

Also IIRC for youtube, alternative frontends don't tend to rely on someone else's endpoints.

> If you are worried, just run a second Chrome session with NordVPN

I feel like I’m on YouTube already.

It’s not like they are free of criticism either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordVPN#Criticism

> worse, essentially escaping Google's tracking just to give our data to random strangers

I'd much rather send random tidbits of information, that are nearly useless in isolation, to strangers than to the central tracking corporation

In the end, there is no way to reveal what information you're interested in when retrieving data, short of retrieving a ton of data and doing the filtering client-side, which is also an option with these third parties if you so desire

I'm happy to give my watch history to some unknown in exchange for never ever seeing an ad.

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