excessive data being sent to bc.googlecontent.com

[John Wallace]

I've recently noticed that my network connection is being overloaded with Megabytes of data being sent out to bc.googlecontent.com when downloading an HLS stream. This really degrades my bandwidth and consumes valuable data time.  Why is this happening? And can it be stopped?

[Wild Willy]

I suspect the content you are downloading is actually being hosted on that site. But
that's a guess. Post a URL where you are seeing this & I'll take a look at it.

[John Wallace]

Thanks for the hint. After researching further, I found that this is highly invasive google tracking being embedded in the site I was accessing.  I strongly suggest to all to get the Ublock Origin extension for their browsers if you value your privacy and don't want Google tracking your activity or others with badly implemented tracking on their websites.

[Wild Willy]

After I posted, I did a little research. The name of the site is not googlecontent.com
but googleusercontent.com. This is one of the sites that make up the infamous cloud.
You can't avoid them. Others I have noticed are Cloudfront, Akamai Technologies, & AWS
(Amazon). But there's no doubt tons more. You're not going to get too far these days
without encountering one of these or a number of others. You simply must not block them.

On the other hand, there are a number of Google sites that are nothing but tracking
services or ad servers. Some I've noticed are:

googleadservices.com
googlesyndication.com
googletagservices.com

There's probably more. You can get a product like you've suggested. I just maintain a
HOSTS file that short-circuits references to these sites. I've had the file for at least
15 years so it's grown rather large. Spybot puts a huge chunk into this file. I suspect
most products you can buy or freeware just add entries to your HOSTS file. You can do
this sort of thing yourself, which is what I've been doing for longer than I can
remember. The origin of what I do is here:

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

You have to be careful, though. You can cause certain things to just quit working. For
example, I had blocked redirector.gvt1.com because it seemed to be the source of some
ads. But it turns out Google uses it to distribute Widevine. Widevine is what Firefox
uses to support playing DRM content. Not downloading, just playing it back. Until I
unblocked this site, Firefox was permanently telling me it was in the process of
installing Widevine without ever completing. I was unable to view content on my PC that
I was entitled to from my cable TV provider & Peacock. I unblocked the site & poof magic
suddenly I could watch TV channels from my cable provider & Peacock on my computer. I
also discovered that Tennis Channel uses s0.2mdn.net to authenticate with your cable
provider that you are entitled to stream their programming. I had blocked both
redirector.gvt1.com & s0.2mdn.net because certain sites seemed to be using them to serve
ads. But it turns out they are legitimate & you do need to allow them to work. So you
have to be careful.

[Wild Willy]

And after yet more research . . .

It seems that bc.googleusercontent.com is not itself something you can, for example, do
nslookup on. I tried. It gives no result. The actual IP addresses you're like to see
are in this form:

something.something.something.something.bc.googleusercontent.com

This just indicates that the location in question is somewhere in the part of the cloud
hosted by Google. You may be uncomfortable about Google snooping into your affairs. But
you can't do anything about businesses using cloud services provided by Google. If you
want to visit a site that happens to be in Google's cloud, you either suck it up or avoid
the site. My attitude is that I can't affect this. If that's where the site is & I want
to visit it, so be it. This is now the way of the Internet. I don't see any way to
protest this any more than I see a way of protesting gravity.