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Comment by mathgradthrow | Hacker News Reader

The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears. Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears. It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.

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>The right to block advertisements is the right to close your eyes and plug your ears

True

>Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears.

Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service?

> It's a violation of my person to try and detect whether I'm not paying attention to your ad.

No it's not.

> Google can have any terms of service they want - it's their service, if you don't like the terms don't use the service?

Or you could, I dunno, don't agree to their terms and use their service anyways?

Which is exactly why they want to implement WEI and shove that DRM system in to the browser specs so that you cannot abuse their service.

It's also why it's important to fight against anti user standards.

I dunno - as I've gotten older I've more taken to the idea that if you dislike how a company or a person does things, you walk away and don't engage with them anymore. Trying to dick around and bypass things you dislike while still consuming stuff from that company is showing you to be the weak party.

You look at how many people "quit" twitter over the last year - if even a quarter of those people legit just walked away (either to a different service or left that aspect of the net behind) the social media landscape would be much different right now.

There is an old Black Mirror episode where people have to sit in cubicles with 4 screens around them looking at ads to gain credits or something, and it tracks if you close your eyes it simply pauses the ads...

It didn't just pause the ads. It caused active discomfort with loud sounds and aggressive lighting until vision was returned to it.

I believe Google still has the right to waste 3 seconds of your time, so if they only verify that you wait for the duration of the ad, that would be a fair equivalent to you closing your eyes.

And I guess that's the next line of defense: GPU shaders to just replace ads with something more pretty to look at.

Absolutely. Bring in the cats.

> Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears

Where are they doing this?

Supposedly by not providing service if you don’t watch the ads. I don’t see a strong connection. I happily pay for Premium because the value I get from YT is 3x what I pay for it, if not more.

"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots."

The executives for the networks (in which I include YouTube) believe that you have a legal and moral obligation to watch their advertisements -- it's only a fair trade for supplying free, ad supported programming. By watching the show and closing your eyes and plugging your ears when the ads come on, you are cheating on your end of the deal and "actually stealing programming", and the networks have very powerful lawyers who will argue this very convincingly in court.

You don't have the right to be a thief.

If you want to live in a world where closing your eyes is stealing, I will absolutely fight a war with you over it.

You still have the choice to close your eyes: just don't watch the show.

There's a good example. Some greedy gas stations blast ads while you're pumping gas: your money for gas isn't enough, they want to steal your attention as well. But a customer may wear in-ear headphones that normally play music, but can also play nothing, let the outer sounds in, except for the speech frequencies silenced by the active noise suppression. It so happens that ads rely on speech frequencies to steal attention. Problems begin when the ads platform that gas stations use and the manufacturer of those smart headphones is the same company.

Some greedy gas stations blast ads while you're pumping gas: your money for gas isn't enough, they want to steal your attention as well.

While I'm just annoyed as you are by the ads blasting while I'm refueling, I want to highlight that gas stations don't typically significantly profit from selling gas; their profit might be as little as a few cents per gallon. Instead, the primary source of revenue and profits for them is usually the attached convenience store or other services.

Here's a few sources (unverified, but here for convenience):

https://fortune.com/2022/08/09/energy-profit-margins-gas-sta...

https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-gas-stations/

https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2021/11/22/1074398-who-m...

https://www.cattlerange.com/articles/2022/04/how-much-do-gas...

https://www.projectionhub.com/post/gas-stations-industry-fin...

After a little experimentation when they started doing this I found the second button from the top on the right immediately mutes the audio. Since then I’ve verified this works at a lot of different gas stations on car trips across the US.

I'll second this. I have found some that use a different button but usually one of them cancels it so feel free to try them all. I think I've found only one that couldn't be at least muted in this way.

It used to work everywhere. Over the last 2 years, an increasing number of pumps have been modified so that this no longer works.

a few I've seen, some kind soul will have marked the mute button with a sharpie

I find this interesting. Do you consider YouTube to just be a consumer product or does it occupy a different space in your mind?

> Google is trying to argue that its a violation of their terms of service to close your eyes and plug your ears.

No, they are trying to argue it's against their ToS to SKIP it entirely. No one is forcing you to actually pay attention, but you have to wait X seconds. You can close your eyes all you want, but you cannot entirely skip them.

if enough people start closing their eyes and plugging their ears I'd expect some PM at Google to enforce a camera requirement

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