Youtube privacy when using Freetube
Hi,
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With all the trouble Piped is going through now and most instances of Invidious capping at 720p, I have been trying to figure out how to use Freetube in a better way. Freetube can either be used to proxy videos through Invidious or to directly stream from Youtube.
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I was wondering to what extent I am tracked when streaming from Youtube while using Freetube behind a VPN, while not being logged in.
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Thanks :)
Should be no tracking. As long you are using a vpn, your public IP address shouldn't be visible to YouTube and freetube doesn't load the tracking scripts used by YouTube. It makes api requests to fetch only the video content.
what's the trouble with Piped?
Google is apparently going full scorched-earth policy by banning the ip addresses of proxy servers. Other frontends are experiencing this issue too, though I will say I used Piped today successfully at 1080p on the official instance so maybe it's working again?
It really depends of the instance/time of the day, but lately it has been very inconsistent: subscriptions list not loading, need to change instance every day, some instances buffering a lot, etc