Is Youtube cracking down VPN harshly?

VPN
1

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well. I’d like to share an issue with Youtube and VPN recently.

I use a private VPN server to access region-restricted content, such as anime on YouTube. This is a dedicated server with a unique IP that only I use (not a shared service like NordVPN or ExpressVPN).

Until recently, everything worked perfectly. Netflix, for example, doesn’t detect the VPN and prompts me to pay in the correct currency for the region. Basic IP and DNS leak tests also show no issues.

However, about two weeks ago, YouTube on my Fire Stick began defaulting to my actual country, blocking all region-restricted content. This issue now occurs across all my devices, including my phone and PC.

I understand that location services on phones might reveal the real country, but even when I use my PC in Chrome’s Incognito mode, YouTube still seems to detect my real location. This surprised me since Incognito mode starts without any account signed in.

I suspect that Chrome might be gathering hardware identifiers like the motherboard ID, OS UUID, or PC ID, which YouTube could be using to match and override the VPN’s IP.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Are there any solutions or workarounds you would recommend?

(Just to clarify, I’m aware that YouTube allows you to change the country in your profile settings, but this doesn’t enable access to region-restricted content.)

2

It is possible to tunnel through VPN protections by interpreting IP packets down to the application level, but this takes unusual hardware to be able to process without slowing down the internet. I’ve heard that Russia and China are investing in this technology but don’t know if they’ve succeeded to make it work on a country wide scale.

Personally, I’d try to use a 3rd party VPN that has its physical servers in safe countries. People forget that if you use a 3rd party VPN in a country like Russia or China, that if the server gets raided by the government, your ID and location are potentially exposed, even if they don’t have logs. Probably the safest VPNs to use are in Scandinavia and logless, meaning they don’t track your activity.

As for running your own VPN, I haven’t tried that since Microsoft did network courses, but my hunch is that you’re somehow blocking something in the API. The API uses so many IP addresses, not just YouTube.com. Perhaps you could monitor what IP addresses YouTube are trying to connect to, and make sure you’re not disrupting them. I bet there’s at least a dozen or so and if one of them fails, the whole page may refuse to load.

3

I doubt Chrome is sending hardware ID data directly to Youtube. If so that could be abused by many websites (it would be more effective than tracking cookies).

It might be worth checking the IP address geolocation record.