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.
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.
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.
Wait… so the red lines are added ON PURPOSE to deliberately degrade experience, and are not a side effect of having Canvas disabled?
Maybe, I don’t know if it was on purpose. But the red lines are the red-fade-to-pink effect of the progress bar I believe, and I have not found a need for such a feature, so they might be using this feature as an excuse to claim the need of canvas.
Sure sounds like it’s just an excuse, since it worked swimmingly before the canvas claim.
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.
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Yes because as we all know that’s too hard for Google to achieve.
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Glory to Peertube!
They had a redesign and it looks pretty and is usable.
Use NewPipe
This issue impacts PCs mainly.
