Whether you want to waste time like never before, or learn something quite valuable, YouTube has got you covered. YouTube is undeniably one of the most important platforms of our time, but it’s not exactly known for stellar privacy practices.
Having said that, there are a lot of ways one can protect his or her privacy while using YouTube, starting with the basic turning on of the Incognito mode for both YouTube and the browser, to using VPNs.
If, however, you don’t want to deal with any of that, but still want to protect your privacy while using YouTube, then you’ll definitely love FreeTube.
What exactly is FreeTube and how does it work?
FreeTube is a community-built, free and open-source application that’s all about making YouTube a lot more privacy friendly. To be more specific, it’s a YouTube client that removes all the YouTube advertisements, and prevents most (if not all) of Google’s tracking elements.
The way it works is quite interesting. The app uses a built-in extractor to grab and serve data (optionally, you can also use the Invidious extractor). In short, it doesn’t use any official YouTube APIs to obtain data. Hence, it somewhat bypasses YouTube’s devices that can still see your video requests, but can no longer track you using JavaScript or cookies.
To help with that, FreeTube also saves all your data locally. This means that your subscriptions, history data is all stored locally. Couple FreeTube with a decent VPN or even Tor, and you got yourself the perfect way of ensuring that nobody except you knows what you watch on YouTube.
Sounds good, what about features?
We already mentioned all the subscription and history data is stored locally and the fact that FreeTube bypasses ads. What’s nice about FreeTube is that it also allows you to subscribe to channels without using an account.
In addition, you can also import your subscriptions from YouTube to see your feed instantly. Subscriptions can be organized into “Profiles” (a good way to create a more focused feed).
With that out of the way, all that’s left to talk about is the GUI. Now, FreeTube won’t be winning any GUI design awards very time soon, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. In fact, the GUI is fairly similar with that of YouTube. You also get full system theme support, a decent mini-player, and enough customization features to make it worth your while.
Conclusion
Taking everything into account, FreeTube is a very interesting project that’s sure to grab some attention. It not only prevents YouTube from tracking your browsing behavior, but it also delivers an arguably cleaner YouTube viewing experience (thanks to its built-in ad-blocker).
