Today I filed a formal complaint against #YouTube with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner for their illegal deployment of #adblock detection technologies.
Under Article 5(3) of 2002/58/EC YouTube are legally obligated to obtain consent before storing or accessing information already stored on an end user's terminal equipment unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
Nope, the point is that, at the moment, Google seems to look where it should not look to know if a user has an adblocker and they don’t ask for permission.
Let put it in another way: Google need to have my permission to look into my device.
But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads.
Which is fine as long as Google can decide that I am using an adblocker without violating any law, which is pretty hard.
Of course Google could decide that it is better to leave EU and it law that protect the users, but is it a smart move from a company point of view ?
What they’re doing is illegal. It has to stop immediately and they have to be held accountable
What they’re doing is immoral and every barrier we can put up against it is a valid pursuit
Restricting Google to data held remotely is a good barrier. They shouldn’t be able to help themselves to users local data, and it’s something that most people can understand: the data that is physically within your system is yours alone. They would have to get permission from each user to transfer that data, which is right.
This legal route commits to personal permissions and is a step to maintaining user data within the country of origin. Far from being a “dead end”, it’s the foundation and beginnings of a sensible policy on data ownership. This far, no further.
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I’d guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they’ve had enough.
I think it’s a question of drawing a line between “commercial right” and “public good”.
Mathematical theorems automatically come under public good (because apparently they count as discoveries, which is nonsense - they are constructions), but an artist’s sketch comes under commercial right.
YouTube as a platform is so ubiquitously large, I suspect a lot of people consider it a public good rather than a commercial right. Given there is a large body of educational content, as well as some essential lifesaving content, there is an argument to be made for it. Indeed, even the creative content deserves a platform.
A company that harvests the data of billions, has sold that data without permission for decades, and evades tax like a champion certainly owes a debt of public good.
The actions of Google are not those of a company “seeking their due”, for their due has long since been harvested by their monopolisation of searches, their walked garden appstore, and their use of our data to train their paid AI product.
Won’t cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
> but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn’t care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can’t get it with adblock.
> but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you’re a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it’s time to jump ship.
I feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you’ll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won’t be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
You could have an app running in the background that detects ads based on the audio (like Shazam for music) and skips it for you. You could probably analyse all the video slices YT sends you and detect ads that way. I think as long as we are still in control of the playback devices we can find ways to make them skip ads.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Ah yeah the kind of hullabaloo that makes everyone accept cookies on every single website ;)
shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
Also exists on chromium for the chrome/opera/… lovers here
Yay for ublocks annoyance pop up blocker. No more cookie pop ups
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
Nope, the point is that, at the moment, Google seems to look where it should not look to know if a user has an adblocker and they don’t ask for permission.
Let put it in another way: Google need to have my permission to look into my device.
Which is fine as long as Google can decide that I am using an adblocker without violating any law, which is pretty hard.
Of course Google could decide that it is better to leave EU and it law that protect the users, but is it a smart move from a company point of view ?
You’re missing the point/s
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I’d guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they’ve had enough.
I think it’s a question of drawing a line between “commercial right” and “public good”.
Mathematical theorems automatically come under public good (because apparently they count as discoveries, which is nonsense - they are constructions), but an artist’s sketch comes under commercial right.
YouTube as a platform is so ubiquitously large, I suspect a lot of people consider it a public good rather than a commercial right. Given there is a large body of educational content, as well as some essential lifesaving content, there is an argument to be made for it. Indeed, even the creative content deserves a platform.
A company that harvests the data of billions, has sold that data without permission for decades, and evades tax like a champion certainly owes a debt of public good.
The actions of Google are not those of a company “seeking their due”, for their due has long since been harvested by their monopolisation of searches, their walked garden appstore, and their use of our data to train their paid AI product.
Unrecognized entitlement on their part, lol.
Immoral? For making you watch ads? How are ads immoral? You’re using the service, you watch ads, it’s not rocket surgery
Its immoral for the way its being done, not what was done.
deleted by creator
Won’t cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Afaik you can’t bypass laws and regulations with ToS
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
> but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn’t care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can’t get it with adblock.
> but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you’re a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it’s time to jump ship.
Google DOES make money from ads. A metric tuckton of it. Why the fuck else would they need your data other than to serve better ads???
I feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you’ll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won’t be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?
That only works by users crowdsourcing and flagging the advert sections.
By doing it on the fly, each user could get different ads in different places.
You could have an app running in the background that detects ads based on the audio (like Shazam for music) and skips it for you. You could probably analyse all the video slices YT sends you and detect ads that way. I think as long as we are still in control of the playback devices we can find ways to make them skip ads.
There even is a project that uses machine learning to detect sponsor segments. https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
MythTV has a broadcast television ad detection module and it works pretty damn well.
This goes into a bit of detail on it’s methods:
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_detection
A lot of what it does could be applied to a video stream, although adapting it to useful real-time could be tricky.