Couldn’t they somejow just correlate that info and know that its you watching the video. I feel like its futile…

  • Sem@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    24 days ago

    Yes. For me reasons of VPN on Android (even with Google) are following:

    1. Most of greedy apps are trying to collect info about your location. Because in most of the cases you will restrict direct access to the location data, apps will try to do it through IP. VPN resolve this problem at all.
    2. A lot of greedy apps or websites are trying to do fingerprinting to identity your logs. While it is possible in theory to do fingerprinting by fuzzy matching all-logs against all-logs, the task is so computationally heavy that the only way is to try to do fuzzy-matching (aka fingerprinting) within the locations. VPN allows you to hide your location.

    Of course one may say that VPN does not provide a 100% protections from fingerprinting, I think there should be applied the same approach like in cyber security: the goal is not to protect yourself by 100% but to make attack so expensive that it does not make sense. VPN makes fingerprinting so hard that noone will really do it until you are a journalist, intelligence officer or something like this.

  • Termight@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    24 days ago

    A VPN does not provide inherent security. It is only as trustworthy as the entity providing it. As I understand it, A VPN to a safe LAN with firewall or such, yes. A VPN to a sketchy third party that will basically log everything you do, no.

  • TheProtagonist@lemmy.world
    1·
    24 days ago

    Is this even possible? My impression is that nowadays Google, whenever they have the impression that a connection to YouTube may been proxied, require a sign-in to prove that "“you are no bot” (I wonder which bots are watching YT videos), but in fact to avoid access via VPN or proxying via Invidious or Piped.

    That’s the reason why YouTube is essentially dead for me now.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      24 days ago

      Is this even possible? My impression is that nowadays Google, whenever they have the impression that a connection to YouTube may been proxied, require a sign-in to prove that "“you are no bot”

      On Mullvad/IVPN, if you keep change the server, you’ll eventually find one that works. Might have to switch like 7-10 times.

      On ProtonVPN, they have way more servers, so you only need to change the server 2-3 times. I actually didn’t need to change the server the last time I used ProtonVPN.

    • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
      1·
      24 days ago

      I use PipePipe and Mullvad to watch YouTube everyday. Occasionally it complains, and I just have to change the VPN server.

        • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
          1·
          24 days ago

          Ah, I see. At the least though, it demonstrates that it is still possible to watch YouTube via proxy.

          • TheProtagonist@lemmy.world
            2·
            24 days ago

            I am not even so much concerned about Google / YT getting my IP (by using a VPN), but I would only watch it though an alternative ad-blocking frontend (like Invidious, Piped, FreeTube) and not the standard YT website or app.

            None of my previously used alternative apps / frontends seems to be working anymore (at least that’s my recent experience). Not sure what the difference to (Android) apps, that apparently still work (NewPipe, PipePipe) actually is, but it seems that these apps are the only remaining alternative frontends.