Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law
theregister.com
theregister.com
Google is big enough where they could eventually do this most likely, but smaller sites won't have the 'credit' to pull this off.
YouTube already re-encodes every uploaded video into multiple formats; it would be possible for them to develop a "smart" encoder to be aware of the visual content of the video in order to place "key" frames at natural breaking points of the video, such that subsequent ad insertion would be semantically correct and not too jarring.
We didn't try it with VP8/VP9 (previously On2 / Duck TrueMotion) or whatever Google seems to prefer to push instead of the emerging "standard" challenging Flash back then, so I can't comment on that particular flavor.
Much more difficult if you're trying to support multiple types of streaming to multiple eras of clients (e.g. legacy TVs and handsets with earlier YouTube clients), as they surely still have to.
But in the end it would be again an arms race of adblockers and Google, so it would change basically nothing.
Is there any legit data about how much revenue loss is resulted from adblocking users?
From my years of experience commutiny and knowning non-tech savvy users(majority of my circle and beyond), most people just mindlessly wait for the video ad to display the skip button and then continue watching.
I would assume that only a very minor segment of users use anykind of adblock. And if anyone is using adblock, it means they are extremely hard customers to sell anything and probably can spot all the scammy things those ads are promoting. And to add insult to injury, now even 5 minutes of videos include at least 3 minutes(exaggerated but not too much) of promotions by the creator.
If, YT is suffering from this already hard to convert people using adblocks, I'd say they need to look at their business model.
Also, unlike may be 2-3 years ago, most people during my daily commute to work no longer watch YT, rather the frequent stuff are FB/TikTok/Instagram reels/shorts(or whatever those are called).
Also, I'd pay for a subscription if getting YT premium means my search for things wouldn't turn up a video where someone is typing something or doing 10 promotions(on top of obnoxious Dior or whatever adverts) before sharing the actual information at last 1-2 seconds or no useful info at all even. Recently, when I seek for something, the top 10 results are frequently click-baits, promoting lots of garbage with no useful info at all (ala recipe sites w/ huge history and tradition blurb before giving the recipe).
Adblock usage has always been high on desktop, but the problem now is that users are using Adblock on their mobile devices as well, and our mobile site has feature parity with our app so there’s no point in using the app.
Our users trend young with more than 70% being under 25.
Currently we are only able to survive because our older members joined the subscription service as they aged out of the sub 25 age range. If we were starting this site today, it would be impossible. In fact, most of our completion is people who are hosting for “free” on Cloudflare before their site dies when they get forced to pay bandwidth bills.
Advertisers are paying less because ads are overvalued.
Even if the user is not running an adblocker, any number of things could cause an ad to fail to load, load slowly, etc. Ad blindness is also a huge issue. That last part is why so many are turning to Amazon affiliate links.
The best decision I ever made was implementing a low cost subscription. The subscription revenue pays 3X as much as ad revenue. I charge just a couple bucks a month. The subscription removes ads, enhances privacy, and gives early access to content. I don’t woory about adblockers at all. I tried fighting them years ago and the 5% of additional revenue did not pay for the time invested. I don’t even pop up an anti adblocker popup.
But I saw one yesterday by mistake. A scam trying to sell me some sort of infinite energy device.
Member States shall ensure that the use of electronic communications networks to store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned is provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing, and is offered the right to refuse such processing by the data controller. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out or facilitating the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order to provide an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber violates.
If they would detect this server side it wouldn't be illegal.
Scripts are continuously accessing browser state. It’s what web sites do. She. You visit a site you give consent to the site to run its code on your system. You can’t have a website without this.
Under your silly assertion loading any website ads or not would be a violation.
Visiting a website does not give that website permission to read or write any data on the user device that's not required for delivering the website. This is mostly used in relation to cookies, but the law is not specific to cookies. It affects any data, read or written.
Three options:
1. It's required to deliver the service the user requested.
2. You've asked consent
3. It's illegal.
No other options, no technical loopholes. So a script to detect ad blockers (which is not required to deliver the requested service) must either run without reading any data from the user device, or ask for permission. If not, it's illegal. Which is exactly what's confirmed in the article by the Irish privacy regulator. Not sure why you think you know better than the regulators.
99% of the scripts sent to the browser are not required, we could just live in a text world.
Privacy is about reporting information back to somebody or collecting information. A script running on the browser who does not consist of a privacy issue simply for running. You might have a case if the browser then sent back details.
But we can use your same logic to say, Google has delivered scripts to the browser to ensure that the content that is to be delivered IS being delivered. In such advertisements are part of the content you requested to deliver.
Your insane view of the wording of the law would mean 100% of every website that uses scripts to deliver its content are violating the law. Because zero scripts are required to make websites as they exist today.
Conflating running a script your browser downloaded (that you told it to do) to a privacy issue is insane. If your insanity spreads to others you can basically say good buy to websites as we know it.
And maybe next time read the article before you continue to comment on it, because this is not my "insane view of the wording of the law". This is how the European Commission and the Irish privacy regulators (Google Europe is in Ireland) see it. Quoting straight from the article:
> "In early 2016 I wrote to the European Commission requesting a formal legal clarification [..] Specifically whether the deployment of scripts or other technologies to detect an ad blocker would require consent (as it is not strictly necessary for the provision of the requested service and is purely for the interests of the publisher). The European Commission sent me a formal written response agreeing with my position that such activities would require consent."
It's fine if you disagree with these laws, many people do. But it is how the law currently works as confirmed by the people that wrote the law as well as the agency that enforces it.
> In early 2016 I wrote to the European Commission requesting a formal legal clarification
I don't think their opinion is law. The law is the law and until it is it is tested in the courts it is not illegal.
You'd have to pay each website you consume, and obviously people won't have 50 individual subscriptions.
YouTube even offers a premium plan, so people are essentially arguing they're entitled to consuming content for free with no exchange.
You assume for some werid reason, that using adblock is in a way popular... gosh, how to break it to you - outside of the tech bubble people hardly know it's possible to block adds...
> Content moves behind subscription requirements
As it should be!
I don’t like ads, but I think the only ethical options are posting to avoid them (preferably direct to artists) or watching ads, so I can understand why people want companies to be able to use ads to pay for their costs since the alternative is a lot of content many people won’t see because it won’t be made.
I think that ethical position is weakened by the fact many ads are links to scams and unethical things. You aren't just supporting creators by watching adverts, you're also potentially exposing yourself to bad faith actors.
If someone is playing honest with me in good faith, and they ask for a show of good faith back, I think reciprocity, good manners and ethics favour the idea that I should do so.
If someone asks me to play fair with them, and then tries to shaft me - then any consideration I might have had for their position goes out the window. I don’t feel the slightest need to play fair with them because they are a bad faith actor.
To be clear, this is purely an opinion about ads on YouTube and whether I have to sit in one of two ethical buckets, not advocating an anything goes position.
My opinion is that there’s a third ethical position, which is a bit like the classical solution to the prisoner’s dilemma: co-operate until the other person plays you false. After that, don’t consider them a friend, and there’s no ethical problem in refusing to cooperate with them.
A whole lot of shit is still shit though.
They haven't forgotten anything. This claim is so barely true it's not worth considering.
The web both became accessible to ordinary users and gained support for inline images with the release of Win/Mac Mosaic in August 1993. In October 1994 the first banner ad appeared in HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine.
Given that that web went only one year between gaining support for images and people starting to use them for advertising, the idea that the web existed before advertising isn't really true. There have been ads for as long as there has been web content created by paid professionals, as is to be expected.
> I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
You are of course welcome to create a list of websites that don't advertise and then only browse those, although recall that HN obviously wouldn't be usable by you as it is supported by ads. The rest of us will get on with living our lives.
Accepting payments from users can make the site have to deal with sales taxes or VAT in every jurisdiction that it has paid users in.
A reasonable way for sites to deal with that is for the site to not sell directly to users. Instead they sell to some third party aggregator and the aggregator sells to users. Basically the same model we see with app stores--people in 20 different countries buy your iOS app through Apple's store and it is Apple that deals with the 20 different tax authorities.
I think we'd end up with a very small of very large aggregators, because generally a bigger aggregator is more efficient than a smaller aggregator.
But then we probably won't need micropayments for this. Nearly everyone will be using the aggregators enough that an occasional normal sized payment to maintain a credit in their accounts will work.
There needs to be political will to do so, but if advertising does become unprofitable there will be pressure for such political will to exist.
Also, sales tax is mainly a US problem with every state rolling their own tax regime. Intra-EU VAT collection is actually pretty straightforward in comparison; unless someone claims to be not from EU or is an EU-based business, you charge the nominal VAT rate from your country, remit it to your government and call it a day.
Assuming you are talking about VAT MOSS, it's the VAT rate of your customer's country.
You also need to collect multiple pieces of non-contradictory location proof to justify why you are charging the rate you are.
Most of YouTube is just clickbait anyway
Google's "Web Integrity" and Microsoft's mandatory TPM in Windows are working hard to save the day!
What Google servers send is what your browser will render. Guaranteed integrity, end to end. Though not "your" browser technically. And not really "your" machine anymore, but nevermind that. Just sit back and enjoy your YouTube.
In many ways that is the problem, and it is created by the video streaming industry which demands it's pound of flesh. Eventually they will run out of steam and a more friendly means of streaming will emerge. At the moment it feels like a stand off, which none of us want.
This problem is largely solved for audio.
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.
Don’t tell me what to do with packets on my network, either. If you want to use a broken business model that is on you.
What they cannot do is access your device without your consent. So scanning for adblock extensions is illegal in Europe if you didn't ask permission for it.
Or maybe more likely, consume content from unfriendly countries who will simply ignore the regulation, and force a continuous game of whack a mole with their domains.
If Europe takes this stance, those competitors could also be allowed to mirror the content from foreign, non-GDPR-compliant companies, effectively giving them the best of both worlds?
Where would this domestic competitor even get the content from? Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
But maybe the website can just (in combination with a universal micropayments system) charge a reasonable fee and that people will just pay it?
> Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?
Why wouldn't those ads be blocked? And they cannot take countermeasures if they were held as illegal in this case. Not sure how that's an alternative.
>That's another hypothesis. The EU could just rule that it's legal to copy content provided for free and then legally "steal" it from other platforms?
Won't that kill EU content creators more than other ones, because non-English EU based content is mostly created and consumed within the EU.
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
The very same way that they’ve been doing so far. YouTube/Google/Alphabet is definitely not short on cash, so that means that even with ad blocking they’re doing just fine.
Which is a completely arbitrary restriction, thus people were working around it by splitting their video in parts?
It isn't any cheaper to serve 10 short video files instead of 1 long video file (in fact it might be more expensive since a good codec would make 1 video file smaller in size than its equivalent separated into 10 discrete files).
The bad faith hysterics of some of the people who block ads is really something to behold.
First and foremost is the issue of companies trying to dictate what you are allowed to do on your own computer. If Google sends you the data, who are they to say how your computer decides to interpret it? What's next? Mandatory camera access so they can monitor your living room to make sure "unauthorized" people aren't watching? They would if they could get away with it.
Two is the business model of offering a free, useful service until people are hooked and then squeezing people for money. It's dishonest, it's extortion. Especially something like YouTube where the site itself is meaningless without the content creators who all largely started out as volunteers. It's the digital equivalent of a time-share sales pitch. Trap your audience. It perverts the normal operation of markets because everyone made decisions to use YouTube based on false economics, and now they are such a behemoth that moving to other platforms is not realistic for many. Had they not been allowed to do that, then the competitive landscape would look much different.
The USA has startups and builds software. Web services and AI.
Europe has bureaucracy and builds regulations. GDPR, work regulations, DIN standards.
Where will this end? Long term, when AI makes human labor obsolete, what does Europe have to take part in world trade? We don't have much natural resources either.
Build actual physical goods that all this bullshit "services" economy nevertheless requires and takes for granted?
And will soon require the AI to do so.
Why would someone in the US, China or India buy a physical product build by a machine in Europe for which the European company has to pay an US company like Tesla to use their software? Why not build the thing right in their country?
We do not need to be "protected" from, er, YouTube ads.
The idea that somebody can afford to give something away is just insane. It also shows how little you know about the cost of running a streaming service.