Privacy

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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

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[–] RotatingParts@lemmy.ml 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

This is where we could use a browser plug in that uses AI to learn what an ad is and skip it for us. Now we just need someone to start working on it.

[–] IllNess@infosec.pub 8 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.