Privacy

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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.

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[email protected] : What are benefits for using privacy friendly frontends for apps like Reddit and YouTube compared to accessing them and using UBlock Origin? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It seems like the main benefit of such frontends is the lack of trackers and fingerprinting, but what if the browser, like Firefox, already did that with UBlock Origin and fingerprinting protection?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Think about performance improvement since the frontend does not load things which gets deleted by an addon, so it's lighter on resources.

Talking about privacy, using a frontend prevents Google from getting your IP.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

That’s not entirely correct, invidious doesn’t act as a proxy. From the invidious faq:

By default, the video stream is fetched directly from Google's servers (googlevideo.com) in order to reduce the bandwidth required by invidious, meaning that Google will be able to see your IP address and some other data commonly sent by web browsers, like your user-agent string.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That's invidious, piped actually act as a proxy (which is what I use).
Thanks for pointing out.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Reddit's performance is actually unusable on mobile unless you use infinity

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Also they limit the amount of data your device sends to Google when using YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.

On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.