this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
263 points (97.8% liked)

Privacy

32442 readers
799 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

But they will have to alter othet elements on the page. For example, scrubbing. It will either have to be paused at one specific timestamp while the ad is playing or the ad would have to be incorporated into the length of the video.

In either case, it is detectable.

The video chunks hash can be calculated and then blocked, in a crowdsourced way like with sponsorblock (but way more effective, because it will cover all videos)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The obvious solution to me is sponsorblock switching to sampling pixels out of each frame, like that project that encoded data into video streams (yet resilient to compression), there are algorithms that could fingerprint any ad with an extremely high degree of accuracy. It'd be more complex than the current implementation, but it'd also be more resilient. I'd settle for it hiding the video and suppressing the audio for the ads duration, possibly displaying a countdown timer, vs actually watching the ad. Then Youtube would get paid, but have no way of knowing you haven't seen the ad, and the metrics around their ad effectiveness would ultimately suffer, so users still win.

You could even go so far as to have the client cache the video, several minutes in advance, dropping all the ad frames, so it's a seamless experience for the user. I got money, but will spend 10x as much ensuring Google gets less from me. It ain't about money. It's about sending a message!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Wouldn't it show a Black screen for the duration of the add when you block it?