Irish privacy group files complaint against YouTube adblock detection system
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>in order for YouTube to detect the use of adblockers, they are using javascript in the client to detect various behaviours.
>The deployment of that js file itself requires consent, the running of the javascript within the browser to ascertain how the browser is behaving also requires consent - there is no other legal basis available under the relevant law.
>There is no escape clause here for YouTube, we have EU case law which is binding on all* Member States supporting this.*
Wait, what? You got to be kidding me. This law would make it illegal to operate 99% of websites in the world in EU.
This just feels like some people don't want to watch ads that makes Youtube free so they're trying to use whatever existing law to try to get Youtube to remove the ads. Youtube is funded by ads. It's their way of keeping the service free. Youtube also pays creators with the ad money. If anything, using an adblocker should be "more" illegal than what Youtube is doing. Can we get some common sense here?
that they are unable to come up with a lawful business model is not my (or anyone elses) concern. There is no morality issue here - there is no law which requires us to watch ads and there is no law which forbids us from blocking them (despite decades of lobbying to try to introduce one).
Ads are a cancer on society, they are manipulative and create massive social harms.
Then just pay for a Youtube Premium account and get all your followers to buy a Youtube Premium account. No one is forcing you to use the ad-supported version of Youtube.
This guy never watched ad-supported TV before Netflix? Never made a free Google search? Never used Twitter? He's on Twitter but doesn't pay for the checkmark (not that I like X's approach). Therefore, he's ok using Twitter's ad-supported service. He has a Twitch channel - which is ad-supported mostly.
To me, the author is a giant hypocrite. How can I take the author seriously when he's benefiting from ad-supported free services?
PS. He asks his followers to donate in crypto. He calls himself an "expensive consultant for hire". It feels like this guy is just trying to stir stuff up to get attention and rile up "privacy at all cost" people to give him donations and hire him. This is the equivalent to Hollywood's "all publicity is good publicity" in my opinion.
If there's a difference, at best it's the difference between stiffing Google and helping Google stiff their advertisers. Either way, if everyone did it, it wouldn't last.
Advertisers don’t pay Google by the number of products sold. They pay for Google to display ads. As long as the ads are displayed, the transaction is satisfied.
Advertisers don’t pay for customers’ direct purchases. They know that seeing an ad influences purchase decisions, even when the consumer is aware of the advertisement. You aren’t “stiffing” the advertisers by refusing to buy their product.
It’s really simple: Google can get revenue from advertisers or direct subscribers. Those are their paying customers.
People who block ads entirely don’t count as ad impressions and aren’t paying the subscription fee. They are the only non-revenue user.
You’ve got a right to block ads but Google has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason. Nobody on either is committing a crime.
The leeches want to complain about their poor user experience but Google gave you a paid no-ads option alongside an ad-supported product. I can’t figure out what alternative is reasonable.
Google themselves doesn't want us to use YouTube premium, otherwise they wouldn't be charging multiple times what they earn through ads for the premium service.
I find a ton of value in Youtube Premium. I share it with my family. Youtube Premium also comes with Youtube Music - which allows me to cancel Spotify. Premium provides higher quality videos where applicable. The amount of time I save myself from watching ads is already well worth it.
If you're a light user of Youtube - I would agree that it's not worth it. But the way I use it makes it quite a bargain.
Oh great, a textbook example of using a dominating position in one market to gain entry to another.
If Google gets to complain that "if we all blocked ads, we'll all be worse off", it feels relevant that "If we all played along with Google's monopoly games, we'd be worse off".
If Google can duplicate Spotify’s business and give it away cheaper, why not?
Add more value if you’re Spotify.
Business try to secure a monopoly position all the time and they have done that throughout human history.
Okay, you wouldn’t download a car, I know you’re not “stealing,” but Google has the right to block you just like you have the right to block ads.
If you want an actual answer, here are the ones I use regularly:
- Download offline videos to the phone app
- Picture-in-picture on mobile
- enhanced bitrate 1080p
- background playback on mobile
- “continue watching”
- music streaming
Plus, I don’t have to install and update any bullshit or hacked apps to keep all of it working.
Full list: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en
No bullshit or hacked apps required. Just a $1.99 purchase of a Safari Content Extension from the Apple App Store to restore native features of my OS that hostile JS on YouTube attempted to take away from me.
I think the app works better, faster, easier than the mobile website. You didn’t mention offline downloads, and that’s a major advantage of the app. I queue up downloads for plane rides all the time.
I’m not going to use a desktop interface for my TV, either. I want an app that is designed for use with a remote.
So you found a solution to get around it, and you’re now part of the statistic that Google uses to figure out how much to charge for Premium and how many ads to play for people who don’t block ads. You’re that X% of people who block ads and don’t pay for premium but still use up Google’s hosting resources.
What that means is that you effectively increase the price for paying customers like me, and increase the amount of ads that people who don’t block ads get to see. It is mathematically no different than people entering a Walmart and shoplift roughly 1.6% of the inventory [1], you make the business overhead that little bit higher. Thanks!
Personally, I think for the amount I get out of it the pricing is very fair, it’s a trivial expense, under $4/person/month with the family plan.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/retailers-lost-112-billion-t...
btw, do you think YouTube Premium will eventually include ads? Because the same sort of game theoretic argument applies there, doesn't it? If everyone subscribes to Premium then YouTube will feel emboldened to serve ads there too. Maybe people like you actually need people like me to maintain Premium's differentiation...
and about your "shrinkage" analogy - I could say the same about you, assuming you don't purchase the things in the ads. I'm costing Google money, but I'm saving advertisers money by keeping my non-consuming eyeballs away from them. If Google served me ads they'd just be wasting more money from advertisers, because I wouldn't buy the products advertised in them. (And the only counterargument to this is "well actually you might be convinced to buy something from the ads," which is basically an argument that I should submit myself to psychological warfare, at which point you've lost all moral high ground.)
You didn’t lower the value of Google’s ad network by being less likely to buy things off of advertisements, but you still cost Google 100% of the bandwidth, storage, compute, and labor costs required for you to serve the video.
Hypothetical Example:
Let’s say serving one video costs 5 cents in fixed costs. An advertiser pays 10 cents for an advertisement to be shown to you. The average YouTube premium subscriber pays roughly 10 cents per video and didn’t get shown an ad.
Let’s say you never buy anything but watch the ad. Google got their 10 cents but because you’re the type of customer who will never buy anything, Google’s ad is now worth less. Because you’re such a bad customer Google lowers their ad price down to 9 cents per view, because we can assume that maybe 10% of people who watch ads will just ignore 100% of them.
That means you made Google 9 cents, minus 5 cents for fixed costs, that’s 4 cents in profit.
Now let’s say you pay for premium. The math is obvious, 5 cents of profit.
Now you watched the video with ads blocked. Google paid 5 cents to serve you the video, but nobody paid for it. Net loss is 5 cents.
I know the numbers are far off and made up but you get the idea. People who aren’t susceptible to ads are already baked into the market price of ads. A response rate of something like 5-10% for marketing emails is considered excellent.
If you block ads and don’t pay for premium you’re not even a customer. I realize that that’s not your problem, but again, it’s Google’s prerogative to refuse you service.
And you can call advertisements psychological warfare and perhaps they are in some way, but I don’t see how society would function without them. Basically everyone advertises, including on the individual level. Inviting your friends to a party is an advertisement. Does your employer advertise? And you work for someone who engages in psychological warfare? How could you!! But seriously, how do you develop anything new with the involvement of more than one person without the ability to evangelize it? How do you exchange goods without the ability to make your presence known?
As long as advertisement is moderated in some way it’s just a normal reality of living in society. It’s basically just communication.
As to your question about living in an idealistic world devoid of advertisements... it's an important question, and I believe everyone has a different answer to it that reflects fundamentally different world views. Some prefer the comfort of being followers. Some want to lead. Some want to take risks and explore. Different people have different tolerances for the unknowns they're exposed to. Personally I don't mind being exposed to unknowns and new opportunities, but I want to have as much control over their distribution as I possibly can. Your analogies to jobs and friends are apt enough, but they fall apart as soon as you add a human element. In particular, my friends and my employers are people whom I trust. That's why I'm open to hearing opportunities from them. Whereas Google is possibly the entity that I trust least in the world.
It's worth noting that if YouTube were operated by a more relatable startup, or if it were decentralized with funds propagating directly to creators, then I would be far more sympathetic to its business model. But as it stands, the centralization of Google as an arbiter of payments to my preferred creators is a textbook example of a monopolistic middleman that's captured a market without adding any value beyond basic and commoditized utility. I would also note that I sometimes donate to Twitch streamers, and I subscribe to a few Patreons of YouTubers. My issue is not with them. It's with Google.
Oh, and one more thing... I'm not actually costing Google any money. Their costs are derived mostly from storage. And I'm not uploading any video to YouTube (though I've considered uploading an hour of white noise for every minute of advertisement they force on me). The only costs Google can attribute to me are bandwidth costs, which are almost always effectively free, because they're delivering bits to me over peered connections and sometimes even their own fiber.
And ok, maybe those streaming services offer ad-free plans, but that's moving the goal posts from the original impetus of subscribing to the first (and initially only) tier of a non-free plan (e.g. YouTube Premium in this analogy) explicitly to opt out of ads. And in fact its further evidence that future YouTube will likely offer a paid tier that includes ads, which would negate the primary argument for using any paid tier from them now (if you give a mouse a cookie...)
Is it as good as Spotify for both podcasts and music?
I don't know about podcasts, but there is just so much spoken video content and there is background playback.. so I actually use YT for such content since I have premium (not YT music).
For music, YT (music) has been at least on par with Spotify for me.
Search can be slightly confusing when the content you are looking for has not been uploaded by "official artist channels", but in the end artist, album, title and "go to album" still always work.
It feels they have at least as much content, probably more.
Recommendations have been way better for me so far as well.
Might be because my Spotify account was overfitted and had too many playlists, but spotify recommendations had become unusable for me, that was one of my reasons for cancelling.
I guess the killer feature combination is really just background playback + YouTube catalogue + perfect filtering of music vs non music content.
I did pay for prime and learned my lesson. They can't leave this dog be, so with contempt I treat all thee
This seems like a quote or paraphrase, but no amount of google/ddg/bing/gpt can find me where it's from!
By now it's more like an (additional layer of) antivirus, and thus you should leave it <always on>.
As people find more and more ways to make malicious online adverts and other online software, it becomes more and more important to protect against them.
I know Adblock is “wrong”. I fully admit it. I’m not going to justify my Adblock usage by saying ads are morally wrong.
I should disable Adblock so services can make money. But I don’t because it’s too easy to enable Adblock.
Adblock is not "wrong". And you should not disable it "so services can make money". Would you disable your virus scanner "so services can make money"?
There's plenty of ways to make money that don't include predatory behavior.
Meanwhile, keep your security posture up. Make sure your money goes to people who deserve it, not random people who spy on you or worse.
Keep your adblocker on at all times. It keeps dishonest people at bay, and keeps honest people honest too.
Tell your friends and family to do the same.
"If you don't like the illegal version, just pay for the legal version" is an interesting take, but not particularly compelling.
The refrain "your business model isn't my problem" is common in piracy and ad block debates, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems to be saying that if you can subvert a contract of sorts, then you're morally permitted to do so. Does that mean it's OK to steal from a corner shop (who likely won't have the resources to detect and stop you), because "their business model isn't my problem"?
Requiring someone to download and run things on their computer because a company wants to make their business work that way is not in the same ballpark.
I think it's perfectly within that company's rights to try to detect that you won't run that thing and then refuse to give you free things, though.
Furthermore, they could make illegal that businesses use up the customer's power for their uses (advertising, spyware, DRM, etc).
> If anything, using an adblocker should be "more" illegal than what Youtube is doing.
I don't think so. If YouTube wants to run their software on your computer then it is your own job to decide how that software runs (if it does so at all). If you run your own software, to display it differently or whatever reason, then you can have the right to do. (If you tried to put it on their computer without their permission that should be illegal, just as much as the other way around.) There might be some reason to prohibit it if it involved using up their power and bandwidth, or by repeatedly sending bad data, but if you are blocking ads then that reduces the power usage instead, anyways.
Rather, what should be made illegal is if they sell or provide to you the software or hardware that uses up your power for their use instead, whether for spying or ads or implementing unnecessary restrictions or whatever. (This does not apply to the old style ads on TV and radio which do not involve specialized software on the client side to display them; they are just a part of the show. If you want to block ads you still should, but you would have to add that by yourself.)
>The deployment of that js file itself requires consent
is an “interesting” interpretation of ePrivacy.
This:
>the running of the javascript within the browser to ascertain how the browser is behaving also requires consent
is true in some cases, eg. browser fingerprinting for tracking purposes.
User Agent. The browser or player is yours and your agent. You can play or not play .js as you like.
A. By visiting the site you are deemed to accept the served JavaScript.
B. If not, YouTube will just serve a popup every time you visit, requiring you to accept those terms.
A 'win' will just result in another popup, so seems pretty pyrric to me.
What Google et al are desperately trying to keep people from waking up to is that they have been treating your computer as theirs for the purposes of profit taking for decades. They've also tried to shape case law to normalize that state of affairs in their favor.
Their legal and lobbying departments are there for more than just contract writing.
Further more, even if the code was actually detecting if a specific or any ad-blocker was in use, there should be no privacy concern if the information is not send back to the provider and the notification happens on the client side.
That's not meaningful and informed consent. I can't know what is going to run on my computer before I visit a website. That's like saying I'm legally responsible for malware running on my computer because someone sent me code that I "agreed" to run locally upon clicking a button on a compromised website. Legal precedent by now however disagrees strongly that that's my responsibility.
Your argument about legality is on a different level. Sure you might not be legally liable for the code ran, but YOU did say run code that this website sends me.
Giving permission doe snot mean assuming liability.
It's a lot to assume the average computer user understands the terms of the agreement as you seem to before they click on a link. Arguably it's too much to assume that, which means the responsibility lies elsewhere. Since in this example there's only two parties (server and user), and the user should not be expected to understand the "agreement" they're participating in, only one other party is present and obviously has perfect knowledge of the code that is going to be served to the user and executed by their computer. Ergo the one with perfect knowledge has the responsibility of making sure the code comports with the intentions of the user. There is no justification for the argument that the user must reshape their intentions to mold around what the server ends up providing to them.
This is a you problem. Not the services problem. A service can chose to send whatever images and code it likes. It’s their choice, not yours. You have some choices in your end, depending on your browser. Render images, execute JavaScript, load plugins, store cookies.
Why sites might do what you expect is because they want you to visit the site again. That is the only reason a site has any reason to do what the user expected. CNN could simply start serving a new site today that offers online shopping. Your expectations might be for a news website, but they does not matter at all. Your expectations are not a contract.
At the low level you are sayin “download whatever this web server sends me and execute it”.
If the users intent mattered the I could sue cnn for not being factual, because I intend on a news site to be factual.
About that claim that detecting Adblock may be illegal (2016):
https://blockadblock.com/adblocking/claim-detecting-adblock-...
He says Youtube not being able to "come up with a lawful business model is not my (or anyone elses) concern". I guess his idea of a lawful business model is to solicit crypto donations.
Yikes.
Do any of those services let you opt out of ads for your followers? Or put differently, in what sense is he ad-supported?
I should be able to control my computer and choose what is displayed to me.
> YouTube isn't free to run, and they offer an ad-free service that is reasonably priced for the value provided
YT undercut their rivals and monopolised the market very early on, perhaps illegally, time may tell. I'm sure many users would happily watch their videos elsewhere with different business models and privacy policies but YT largely monopolises the ameteur video market, excluding video shorts like TikTok and it's simply not possible to watch a YT video somewhere else.
If only there was a technology that would solve this problem (cough ActivityPub).
You make it seem like steeling hard earned revenue from Google. In reality people are just punishing Google for shady business practices.
It's a natural consequence of being an ad monopoly combined with an online video monopoly.
YouTube operated like that for a very long time and customers were accustomed to receiving service without any problem. Now the service is being downgraded and customers are unhappy.
This is not being entitled. That is being accustomed to.
Some videos on youtube might be worth my time, but may not be worth my money. Since rules on subscription changes, my decision do also.
This way bandwidth costs would be paid for by the people actually using it, ie. the users.
Running the service as a loss and expecting to recoup it via advertising is a broken business model. Loss leaders always lead to consumer dissatisfaction. People should just pay for what they use.
I do not believe in "unlimited bandwidth" ISP deals. Nothing is unlimited. I want to pay for what I use. This is not entitlement.
It's not my fault they've chosen a broken business model. If I could get the content elsewhere I certainly would. They've used anti-competitive practices to ensure YouTube is the most popular platform for new media. I will not have ads in my own home and I will not pay into one specific monopoly. That's not how the web works.
I'm more than happy to pay for bandwidth, storage, electricity etc. and I do. It's up to them to make this work for them, not me. A peer-to-peer model would solve a lot of their cost problems.
Anyway I just read a doc and I'm back to being plugged in.
Or switch to a serverside approach?
It's so common that there's an addon for that:
I mean, yeah; if inlining the ads means the site doesn't spy on my machine and report back to Google then that's a big win.
If AdBlock and sponsorblock fail on yt I'll just leave for nebula.
Let's get some common sense back.