Privacy concerns with 3rd party data API providers

I have noticed connections being made to a new domain: returnyoutubedislikeapi.com

Whilst I reviewed your change to a new data provider to be able to show dislikes, and don’t find anything particularly worrying about it at the current time, I don’t feel comfortable about it in the long term use.

Past experience showed that despite promises, extensions and their data sometimes get sold: https://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to-advertisers-2013-6

Whilst I am not making a pretrial judgement about the new data API and its operators, it is within the realm of possibilities. And we can discuss it for a minute if you feel like.

Their current reasoning is they have old dislike data before the YT v3 api removed the dislike field from their calls.

What point am I making? It is simple: Even though more prone to errors, I’d prefer an additional option not to use this 3rd party service and use a local JS solution in the addon to estimate the like to dislike ratio.

For videos to be uploaded in the future no old data can exists pre-shutdown of the official API field. So my argument here is, that all future youtube videos would only run a mere guess based on view-to-like ratio anyway, which can be implemented locally.

I’ll continue to use the new service in the meantime, but for understandable reasons, long term I’ll have to make a decision to opt out if there is no local solution. I want to limit 3rd parties from also having my view history. It is only contemporary to be concerned about data reduction and data economy.

Thank you for hearing me out.

[elliotwaite]

I’m going to have to delay working on this for now. Some other important projects have come up and I’m time is currently limited. But if someone else wants to submit a PR for this, I’d be open to reviewing it. And maybe I’ll have more time to work on this in the future.

[elliotwaite]

Sounds good, understood. I’ll try to figure out the likes-to-views option first.