Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Why do podcasts have preroll ads now? (self.privacy)

submitted 1 month ago by cralder to c/[email protected]

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I don't know when this started but I noticed it for the first time a few months ago. Some podcasts will have preroll ads that are obviously tailored to me since they are not in the same language as the podcast, instead they are in my native language and if I connect to a VPN in another country the ad will change to one from that country. They also seem to appear regardless of podcast app. I have used both AntennaPod and Spotify. AntennaPod is free so I guess they source their podcasts from some third party website that could be adding in the ads. But since I am paying for Spotify I am expecting not to have to listen to any ads. So who is adding in these ads? Can I get rid of them or am I just stuck with them?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I mean, usually when I download podcasts there's just 5 or so ads that get injected over-and-over. I don't think it would be too complicated to have some software recognizes the length of an ad, and that it occurs >2x in a file, and then just mark that section as "ad" and auto skip over it