Should yt-dlp be used behind a VPN? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 months ago by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Only recently discovered yt-dlp, despite its popularity. However I was wondering if I were to use this, should it be used behind a VPN when downloading videos off public websites?

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

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[-] Noxious@fedia.io 12 points 2 months ago

Personally I run everything behind a VPN. Browsing the web without one kinda feels like a bad idea, like why should I expose my approximate home location to every website I go to and every server I connect to? Why should I let my ISP see which websites I'm visiting? And why should I trust my government to have access to all of that data?

[-] warlaan@feddit.org 7 points 2 months ago

I don't know. A VPN simply replaces your IP with one from their network, but you still have one IP that identifies you, right? So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the VPN? I mean if Google just stores the IPs that were used to log into accounts they can simply look up who downloaded their videos, right?

[-] Noxious@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago

Well, you can change your IP as often as you want. You can go to a completely different ISP in a different country in a matter of seconds.

So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the VPN?

Yeah, I didn't assume anyone in this community would log in to YouTube, but maybe I'm wrong

[-] warlaan@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

Unless you actively pay attention it's very easy to be logged into some Google service without noticing. At least I wouldn't be surprised if chrome background services kept me logged into my work Google Mail account and kept tracking my IP.

The biggest question is how meaningful the IP alone is. I don't know if VPNs assign people individual IP-adresses or if there's some kind of NAT in use where people share an IP with translated ports. If the information is "there's this individual VPN-user and we need to connect them to a name" then you shouldn't use (the same) VPN for everything, but if it's just "there's another request from the same VPN" then it's fine.