Privacy

32120 readers

634 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

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

262

YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counteract ad blockers (alternativeto.net)

submitted 5 months ago by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

95 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] IllNess@infosec.pub 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can't interact with videos directly I think.

Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?

[–] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Of course they can interact with it just fine, look at "sponsorblock" plug-in. It would also solve this problem completely. It already exists and works well, it just isn't "AI" nonsense.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 4 points 5 months ago

You are missing the point that sponsorblock only works without AI because everyone gets the same video delivered. Once they have targeted ads of variable length and amount you need someone to watch your specific version of the video and do the tagging where the ads ans sponsors are. You could pay someone to do it for you but that is expensive and very slow. Or you can train a ML model to recognize the patterns and tag it for you hopefully pretty fast.

[–] IllNess@infosec.pub 2 points 5 months ago

Yes, that is adding controls and using a database from the SponsorBlock server.

What I mean is a plugin cannot see the video. Like you can't write

if(screen == adScreen) {
     then skipToNextSegment();
}

The plugin isn't reading the video, it is getting info from a database. For AI or machine learning to work ad injection, which might change for every user, doing what SponsorBlock is doing is not enough.