A recent Youtube Web update has added a canvas whenever the seek bar is visible, an HTML5 canvas pops up. This was not asked for and not needed. If you disable canvases for privacy, this will cause a horrific red bad to cover half the screen until you hide the seekbar. Canvases can be used for fingerprinting, which I’m sure Google is doing here.
You can keep canvas blocked on YouTube. To stop the red lines, do this:
Click uBlock Origin icon (top right of the browser, small red shield).
Click the gears icon (“Open the dashboard”).
Click “My filters” tab. Make sure “Enable my custom filters” is checked.
Add the following string to the list of filters:
www.youtube.com##.ytp-gradient-bottom
Click “Apply changes”.
Reload your youtube video page.
🔥🔥 thanks for sharing I tried blocking but couldnt find the element
You aren’t supposed to find the element. Just copy the command into your filters and hit apply.
No I tried to find the element before he shared this.
Ah I misunderstood.
I was wondering what that crazy bar at the bottom was! Sometimes it’s green for me. Yet another reason to keep on the degoogling train…
Google uselessly uses the canvas for its reverse image search. And I do mean uselessly - The image you upload is put onto the canvas, then immediately relayed to the server and never used again.
This is probably a clever way of doing native JPEG image conversion on the front end, instead of pulling in (or reimplementing) a universal image conversion library
Yes because as we all know that’s too hard for Google to achieve.
Yeah, I bet it would be trivial for one of their engineers to whip up a universally compatible, hardware accelerated image file converter in JS, using no external dependencies, and less than 50 lines of code. Hint: it uses Canvas
What exactly is HTML5 canvas image data?
It’s just an API that allows a web page to draw in a box. The problem is, that for a bunch of technical reasons that I’m mostly not aware of, it can be used to fingerprint you.
The canvas API needs specific access to hardware that isn’t usually available via browser APIs. It’s usually harder to get specific capability information from a user’s GPU for example. The canvas API needs capability information to decide how to draw objects across differently capable hardware, and those extra data points make it that much easier to uniquely identify a user. The more data points you can collect, the more unique each visitor is.
Here’s a good utility from the EFF to demonstrate the concept if you or anyone else is curious.
Use NewPipe
This issue impacts PCs mainly.
