YouTube is by far the most popular place for video uploading. Unforunately, YouTube includes Google tracking, geo-restrictions and age-restrictions. Here are two ways to avoid this situation:
HookTube — A YouTube Clone With Less Tracking
HookTube provides an clean interface to YouTube and leaves out the tracking. This service also removes YouTube geo-restrictions and age requirements, and allows you to download the videos you are viewing.
There are three ways to access HookTube. You can find a channel or video on YouTube and replace “youtube” in the URL with “hooktube” to see the same page on HookTube. Or, you can go straight to https://hooktube.com/ and start browsing from there. You can also use this open source extension for Firefox which will automatically redirect YouTube links to HookTube.
Note that Hooktube still streams the video from YouTube servers, so you are not shielded from Google tracking your IP address.
View YouTube Videos on DuckDuckGo
The privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo offer a way to watch Youtube videos without going to the site itself. To do this, you simply search for a video on the DuckDuckGo site and select the “Video” tab. When the video appears, you will be given the option to “Watch Here” or watch on YouTube directly.
Another faster option is to include the !bang command “videos” in your search. For example, you could type “!videos bahamas” to search for videos on the Bahamas.
Note that since the video are streaming from YouTube/Google servers, there is still tracking potential.
nice article!
hooktube is brilliant!
Thanks for that!
I installed browser extensions to redirect all youtube links 🙂