Is there a privacy difference between using a YouTube front-end like NewPipe, LibreTube, or GrayJay vs using a browser like Brave or Firefox with ad blockers like uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow?

  • Voxel@feddit.uk
    4·
    15 hours ago

    Software developer here, while I do not know everything about it, from what I observed and learned is following the case:

    • NewPipe has a component called NewPipe Extractor which is also used by most other opensource YT clients like LibreTube. From what I observed, it extracts the video URL for the stream without rly loading anything else of YouTube.
    • When you use YouTube in a browser, the entire YouTube page is loaded minus the content that has been blocked by Brave Shields, uBlock Origin or other utilities.

    I think privacy and security wise there is not a lot if not at all a difference, as both take a best effort approach to limit YT’s ads and tracking mechanisms.

    The only real difference is if you log in via e.g. Grayjay and on the website directly. Grayjay will only use your token to authenticate while necessary and not share all kinds of data with YT, while the website stores your watch history, search history, etc.