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Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
I’m all about sailing the seven seas, yar har, but at some point the time spent trying to circumvent ads exceeds the $15. Support the people you watch. Hell, I pirate games and if I like it I’ll buy it later. There’s a difference between not getting taken advantage of by corporations and just straight screwing over people trying to make a living.
You should all go file a complaint with a data protection agency.
The thread in the linked social network suggests concentrating the complaints to the Irish DPC: https://forms.dataprotection.ie/contact
I think the internet is turning to shit and that Google/Youtube is greedy like every other conglomerate.
But… they have to get something from people using there services. I personally use YouTube like an iPad kid so I have premium. I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
I was fine paying the premium light subscription price and now they’re killing it and forcing me off that plan and to pay 50% more to add features I 100% don’t use and don’t want to use. And of course they’ll just jack up the price again in 6-12 months because it’s never enough.
they have to get something from people using there services
If the ads weren’t absolutely overwhelming (easily around 50% of all watch time, last time I watched without blockers) and if they weren’t so poorly implemented (starting ads at random times and not even caring if they’re cutting someone off mid-sentence, making 2min+ ads unskippable, accepting ads from very questionable advertisers) it might feel a bit less onerous.
As a free user they get engagement, which may or may not offset what they get out of those that do provide them income. It seems like that was good enough for a couple decades.
I…really don’t think it was ever about engagement. I think most free users just didn’t have an adblocker.
I think ublock orgin’s adoption just picked up over the years, and it’s not as if Youtube gets cheaper (I’d imagine it just gets more expensive)
I mean engagement is great, they make the algorithm work (well, “work”) but I’m pretty sure the ads were the selling point (for google) before premium was even an option.
Google is an advertising company. That’s how they make money. Everything else they do – search, youtube, apps, phones – is just an ancillary sideshow that’s a vehicle to showing people ads, or gathering data on them to use in showing them ads. So you are 100% correct.
assuming the ads are not malicious
All ads are malicious.
They’re not ruling that YT can’t push ads, though. They’re ruling that they’re sniffing around the user’s computer for things that aren’t preventing them provide the service.
In the end, Google has options. One would be, and I’m not saying this is the best one, that they charge everyone to access their site. You know… they way some newspapers do. I’m sure there are other options.
I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
EU techs law don’t ban to push ads, they say that you cannot look into my device to check it I (could) see them without asking for my permission for something that you don’t need to provide a service.
YouTube’s ads have been malicious for years. If now they try to push the ads they used to have people wouldn’t have a reason to complain. But the way YouTube and Google are maximizing all their cash grabs they need to be put down in any way possible.
uBlock Origin has no issues with blocking ads.
I get trying to fight it via legal means, but it is a solved problem.
So is this basically saying youtube isn’t allowed to detect an adblocker?
I’m not sure I really follow why that specifically is something they’re policing.
It about device detection and privacy. Websites in the EU aren’t allowed to scan your hardware or software without your permission, to protect the users privacy. Adblockers fall under this.
If thats how it works, they could very easily just check if the ad ever got loaded and refuse to serve you content until it does. Going after the way they prevent people from abusing their services doesn’t stop them from preventing them - it just gives them a new hurdle and that’s not a very big one.
Good, make them jump through that hoop and respect user privacy.
It’s not even a hoop. It’s a slight side step. And they wouldn’t be breaking anymore of your privacy. They’d still know you’re not loading ads.
But they wouldn’t know how, or with what software. That is indeed protecting one’s privacy.
It can load into my pihole and they can shove it up a different hole.
Well many adblockers can be clever enough to load the asset, but then just drop it. As in yeah the ad image got downloaded to browser, but then the page content got edited to drop the display of the add or turn it to not shown asset in css.
This is age old battle. Site owners go you must do X or no media. However then ad blocker just goes “sure we do that, but then we just ghost the ad to the user”.
Some script needs to be loaded, that would display the ad? All the parts of the script get executed and… then CSS intervention just ghosts the ad that should be playing and so on.
Since the browser and extension are in ultimate control. As said the actual add video might be technically “playing” in the background going through motions, but it’s a no show, no audio player… ergo in practice the ad was blocked, while technically completely executed.
Hence why they want to scan for the software, since only way they can be sure ad will be shown is by verifying a known adhering to showing the ad software stack.
Well EU says that is not allowed, because privacy. Ergo the adblocker prevention is playing a losing battle. Whatever they do on the “make sure ad is shown” side, adblocker maker will just implement counter move.
So then Google just refuses to play the video until the appropriate time expires. Or they embed it in the video feed itself. There are more ways around this than you’re making there out to be.
Personally, I’d prefer waiting 15s to start the video than watching 15s of ad before atching the video, ads have been proven to have an effect on your brain that’s why they keep showing them to you. It’s not about the delay in video watching, it’s about the ad itself.
bro just solved the ad blocker problem! google needs to hire this man!!
Your comment makes me think of Googles new DRM protocol, and then about Ken Thompsons compiler hack, combined with most DRM get hacked eventually.
This gives me hope that even if Googles DRM becomes standard, it will be hacked and YouTube thinks it’s showing ads on a unmodified signed page, but I am not seeing any ads.
Twitch seems to have figured out adblock blocking. Any idea what they’re doing that’s different?
There are ways to get Twitch adblock as well. I use PurpleTV
From my understanding, they embed the ad in the video stream itself so that it’s indistinguishable from the actual content. I imagine Google could serve ads from the same servers that serve videos and integrate them in a way that would be hard to detect, just like Twitch.
I guess the one difference is that I don’t think twitch ads are skippable while youtube’s ads are. I assume embedding the ad into the video would prohibit that. Hopefully youtube doesn’t do that because while the current ad situation is annoying, having only unskippable ads would be pretty unbearable.
Well, YouTube is no stranger to worsening their platform so it really wouldn’t surprise me if they slowly transitioned to unskipable ads
As I understand it, detecting an adblocker is a form of fingerprinting. Fingerprinting like this is a privacy violation unless there is first a consent process.
The outcome of this will be that consent for the detecting will be added to the TOS or as a modal and failing to consent will give up access to the service. It won’t change Youtube’s behavior, I don’t think. But it could result in users being able to opt out of the anti-adblock… just that it also might be opting out of all of YouTube when they do it.
I’m all for this protection but for the sake of argument isn’t use of the service consent to begin with? Or is that the American argument around these types of regulation?
I’m a pihole, vpn, adblock and invidious user ftr… 😂
It’s “consent” from the POV of the law and the corporation, but I say fuck 'em. Do you really consent to everything? Did you read their ToS and Privacy Policy every time it’s amended? In the plain everyday use of the word “consent” I mean. Not in the legal constructions we’ve created.
Thus, since I do not consent to everything in any ToS or Privacy Policy, I use adversarial tech. My use of adversarial tech is how I enforce my lack of consent to everything these platforms expect from me.
If they don’t want us to use adversarial tech anymore, they can change their platforms so it’s no longer necessary.
It depends on the context, but generally you require explicit permission for data-related stuff which means something like a checkbox or a signature.
That’s how the corporate-written laws in the USA handle it most likely. The EU actually has some amount of consumer protection. Burying it in a 100 page terms of service document doesn’t count as consent either.
EU to the rescue again!
Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, “which is illegal in the EU.” Lol
The only thing still preventing mayhem along with California
Fuck yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. California is the only reason we don’t have products giving insta-cancer ect.
Seriously. Everything causes cancer which has the unfortunate effect of dulling the fear response but it is good to know. If you want to sell your product in California, which is where silicon valley is, you need to observe their safety standards.
And thank the EU we might actually get right to repair.
Elon can block EU for Twitter if he wants to but it’s probably going to cost him even more.
The way the guy was flexing about being an “expert”, while it may or may not be true (I haven’t independently verified his credentials), is extremely offputting. Refusing to engage with hecklers is a better policy than flexing with your education, credentials, and experience.
How is it offputting to say “listen to me because I’m an expert, here’s my credentials”? Everybody’s so fast to claim “fake news” nowadays that demonstrating your credibility has become a requirement.
The person he was responding to was asking for some specific clarification. Instead of offering it, he appealed to his own authority, essentially listing his credentials in a pompous way and then saying “You don’t need to understand. I’m the expert, I’ll understand it for you.”
He’s answering to a person saying “IANAL” asking whether this really is illegal with “I am an expert on this particular law, helped to write its replacement and already had confirmation from DG Just (EU Commission) that the law applies in the way I have stated”. Seems perfectly apropos to me.
But he didn’t cite policy, law, or legal analysis. I work as a technology policy writer/interpreter in the US so I can’t address the EU issues. But I’ve never responded to someone who asked for the basis of my conclusion by listing my credentials. When I publish a policy position paper, I cite chapter and verse all relevant laws, policies, statutes, and explanation for interpretation. I’ve written entire pages offering justification for the interpretation of a single sentence a particular way. He didn’t do that. He might be right, but he didn’t justify it in any meaningful way.
Yikes that reply was way out of proportion to the question, holy moly. Listing off his degrees just dripped with insecurity…
IANAL, but since without adblocker site works, but with adblocker youtube breaks it, which means this information somehow is collected, which probably is violation of EU law no matter how exactly Google gets this information. And Google can’t say “we accidentaly are making totally different thing, that just so happens to break adblock” because they just wrote in text that they detected adblock.
Yeah as others have stated, Google could deduce your usage of an adblock through any myriad ways. But you’ve got a point - it’s one to thing to throw a popup saying “Our ads couldn’t play for some reason, we won’t show you videos until they do,” and another to say “We know you are using an adblocker, we won’t show you videos until you disable it.”
Yep. He took a massive ego trip early on and immediately came across as someone I don’t particularly want to side with.
I’m a web developer and fundamentally disagree with his take on what JavaScript can do on the client side. I see what he’s getting at but I think he’s wrong. JavaScript can certainly detect access to resources (ads in this instance) without violating any enforceable policies. Half the internet does error handling with JS for things that won’t load - how can this be construed as violating eprivacy? Nonsense.
That being said I’d love for this feature to go away and would be happy to see YouTube and Google go pound sand… but this feels like a stretch. It was inevitable enshittification imo.
As an English person I thought yay that means us. Then I remembered. . .
Do you wish for more consent popups or do you hope that youtube is afraid of causing friction and will go back to how things were?
… We’re gonna get another cookie click-through, aren’t we?
And then we have Chat control V2…
Thank fuck for EU and GDPR
While I kinda sympathise, I won’t be filing a complaint. I want Youtube to become so shit that even the average user will start looking for alternatives. I want ads plastered everywhere on that site and adblockers to fail miserably at blocking them. I want the average user to be so bothered by the ads that when they stumble upon an alternative they try and convince people to switch. I want content creators to be so bothered by it that they make videos promoting the use of another service.
Make this a competition for alternatives. Don’t make it easy for users to stay on Youtube.
I’m sure content creators will be pissed that more ads are served on their videos haha. Oh no! More money! Whatever will they do? The conversation about ads has two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
While I’d absolutely love for there to be a youtube alternative, they have a pretty much complete monopoly on online video distribution. Hosting all that data is expensive so competitors would need some serious financial backing which would likely put the competitor service in the hands of a large corporation.
removed by mod
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=_–LvdAHfVo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The problem I see, is that it wouldn’t actually be more money for the creators despite there being more ads as the user base actually seeing the ads is reduced and the difference has to be made up in volume.
I guess that’s fair. There’s a critical point where that happens though. Even if they doubled the amount of ads right now, I bet they wouldn’t lose too many people because there aren’t any real competitor platforms. The amount of youtube ads right now is still significantly less than the equivalent watch time of cable channels, for example. You can watch 20 mins of content and sit through maybe 3 5 second skippable ads, and 3 20 second ads or something? Still significantly less than tv where you have 15 mins of ads every hour.
two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
Youtube and content creators are not on the same side. This woefully reduces a complex problem with many different actors down to a Right Side and a Wrong Side, and anyone whose not on My Side, must be on the Wrong Side.
I’m talking about purely in terms of ads on the video. Both youtube and content creators want as as much ad revenue as possible but not to the point where they lose viewership because of the quantity of ads. I’m not saying content creators are in the wrong, I’m just saying that they get paid based on ads, so of course they want more revenue. It’s just an analysis of the relationship, I’m not pointing blame towards anyone.
Ok Satan
Since every person can become a piece of shit, it is useless to constantly change services, so only rules can teach us to live differently from other beasts.
