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- cross-posted to:
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So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That’s their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren’t a tech company. They’re an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they’re likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It’s a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That’s literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It’s what Facebook does. It’s what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
I’m sorry but with all do respect I do not need you to lecture me about how big data dovetails with digital marketing or the B2B side of it for google, thanks.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else. You’re the one who agreed to the terms of service.
At the point where you’re using an adblocker I’d say you’re capable of researching other means to avoid ads on any platform where you don’t want them, paid or free. There’s work-arounds for this problem. Multiple of them. Including using another extension to play just the video in a frame by itself where the adblocker still works, using piped or revanced or any of the other services that offer YouTube experiences without ads (floatplane, grayjay etc), or paying for the service.
As it stands the posts I see about solutions get basically no interaction while rage posts like this get thousands of comments and upvotes and bring with them a bunch of random misinformation. I feel like there’s just too many of these posts full stop.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else.
YouTube has been profitable for years before they implemented these anti-adblock measures.
Where do their profits come from?
Stop and think for a second. Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking. I don’t think YouTube is the good guy in this scenario.
But on the other hand I am tired of people who don’t want solutions they just want to bitch. There’s almost a dozen of these posts on Lemmy alone about YouTube and their draconian new adblock punishing tactics. I don’t care if you’re upset. I care that you’re actively upvoting and sharing solutions for the people who want them.
I gave this person other options besides just “pay for it or quit YouTube”. That was on purpose.
Good day.
Where do their profits come from?
The rubes who don’t use adblockers and those who subscribe.
The point is that YouTube was profitable before implementing these anti-adblocking measures.
Nothing I said is defending this move towards aggressively combating ad locking.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else.
Anyways man, have a good day. Gonna block you now.
I mean, no matter what, you do have a say. You can just not use YouTube. Pretty easy, actually.
That won’t prevent Google from scraping my data from every other website I use.
I’m not sure what that has to do with YouTube detecting ad blockers.
There’s a paid service though.
Like I get the sentiment, and I use YouTube with uBlock Origin to avoid paying, but if you’re not willing to pay and you’re not willing to watch ads what are you proposing?
I didn’t say they can’t serve any ads. I said they’re drowning us in them - which even then I could tolerate except all the data they mine from us is ridiculous. Then they use opaque terms to weaponize it back at us to make us into little addicts who can’t look away and/or sell it to third parties. I do not agree with that so I do everything I can to make my telemetry worthless or otherwise inaccessible.
This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don’t even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
And let’s be honest about who this is paying: Alphabet’s 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
Adversarial tech, like adblockers, is good. We should use it. If people want users to not want to use it, they should change the product so that we don’t want to use it.
It’s not illegal for me to use an ad blocker and it should never become illegal.
But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
I mean time doesn’t, but cost of ads can be cheaper due to competition and then because lots of people use adblockers they need to push more ads on those who don’t block it, really not hard to justify, plus they are a publicly owned company which means they will always suffer from the same problems every other publicly traded company does under capitalism, having to keep growing forever with ever increasing quarterly profits.
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
I mean, you can literally just not use the platform, that’s your negotiating power, but you don’t want that, nor ads, nor paying for it, you want it for free, I mean, I don’t blame you for it, I want shit for free too, who doesn’t, just not how the world works at the moment.
If you want to be this cynical about it I can only tell you one thing: the world does work like that, because people can get away with it and they do.
Yeah corporations can decide to sell our time, eyeballs and data for smaller and smaller fractions of a penny without asking us. Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
Considering how much tech companies get away with, if anyone wants to moralize over not giving them what they demand, I can only laugh.
I mean they asked you, they told you the exact amount they won’t do that for, you don’t want to pay it, so they engaged you in a weapons race of adblockers vs adblocker detectors.
the world works like that because that’s how the world works currently, because that’s the point of evolution we are at, we haven’t yet moved past the capitalist system.
Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
are we still talking about fucking youtube videos or did the conversation somehow changed to be about access to drinking water? damn bro, it’s youtube, a time-sink platform, you don’t need it to live
They themselves are creating ZERO content. It’s the users who are creating content.
There are stil ads with the paid service as i understand it.
Well, there are no YouTube-served ads but a lot of vloggers are using sponsored segments to better monetize their channels. So that’s where sponsor block comes in.
there are not
I’ve never seen an ad and I’ve had yt premium for 6+ years
The existence of the paid offering doesn’t invalidate use of the free offering, regardless of whether people are permitting ads on the latter. Any given Youtube page is just a collection of web elements and a call to a video server: these things get loaded or blocked at my sole discretion. My hardware, my web browser, my internet bandwidth, my opsec, my time.
If I put household items out on the nature strip, I have no expectation that passers-by will have a cup of tea with me first, then take every item as an indivisible lot. So my proposal to Google is: take those items off the nature strip, put them back inside the house and lock the door. Until they do that, no issue exists, despite the company’s efforts to fabricate one.
I cannot get ad-free experience with YT Premium. I can only get ad-free videos bundled with a whole bunch of other useless shit I will never use like YT Music. And the simple reason why I cannot get only ad-free videos is because then I would pay them less, so they don’t give me the option.
I’ve recently been downvoted to oblivion for writing this exact thing, talking about online newspapers.
People don’t want ads and they don’t want to pay. They just expect to get stuff for free and I can’t decide if that’s because Lemmy is either filled with spoiled brats, or people who genuinely do not know how the world works, or both.
In their partial defence, I must say that the way companies have used the Internet up until a few years ago may have led them to believe that free content is a thing.
And, before someone comes along and tries to tear me a new one, YES, I do use uBlock on sites that harvest too many data (e.g. anything by Google) or sites that are too aggressive with ads. But at least I know that I’m either a freeloader or, in the best case scenario, a protester. And I know that, if everyone did the same, so much of the internet would just shut down or go behind paywalls.
I provide financial support to the services I believe in, Washington Post, NYT, Nebula, previously HBO, a few others.
But it’s absolutely on my terms. If I were a broke college student. I’d have no issues pirating literally everything. As it is, I’ll find ways to get the stuff from companies that get too greedy. “Public secrets for sale” isn’t a thing, and that’s all data of any form really is. The difference between someone telling you the basic plot of a movie and telling you every pixel of the movie isn’t all that far apart, just the amount of data they’re repeating.
Nah, it’s neither.
It’s that while I do enjoy whatever it is, if it were to disappear because I’m ad blocking and won’t sub then … ohh well?
There are a select few groups I actually care about and I donate to them (like PBS).
Anything else will either find a way or die but I don’t care which.
that’s my take too, everyone wants free youtube, well the servers aren’t free, the content creators don’t do it for free, youtube is as big as it is and has as varied content it has is because they provide a platform, but then people want to watch it both for free and without ads.
Yes, thank you! I’ve been downvoted previously in a topic similar to this one. I know change can be hard for some people but we always knew this would come sooner or later. A huge company wants to make money off their service and people here act as if it’s their right to find a way around it. It’s not. You were just lucky that there was one. Either find other entertainment or accept that you will get ads.
lol you got downvoted for a perfectly reasonable question, it’s like Reddit all over again
In the second quarter of 2023, Google’s revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
The amount of money they made is entirely meaningless without knowing their spending.
Revenue isn’t profit?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
why would it be invaluable? I am guessing it’s valuable amd is valued at a very close estimate at least.
Invaluable
adjective
beyond calculable or appraisable value; of inestimable worth; priceless:
Why are people down voting you? Damn there’s an infestation of corp simps here
the richest country in the world is a normal country regardless of your xenophobia
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
selling ads was just icing
You’re talking about these as if they’re separate things. Literally no company in existence harvests your data for any reason other than to serve better ads or to drive business decisions internally. Nobody gives a shit about your data otherwise. Ads are literally the only reason.
as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac
I mean… If the shoe fits, man.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
While I agree, you shouldn’t underestimate just how fucking cheap astroturfing services are, and how much easier it is to generate astroturfing posts using the plethora of LLMs out in the wild.
I still think it’s silly to think they’re doing that here, but it should be considered.
True, but it doesn’t make sense to astroturf on a site with the tiniest fraction of users, most of which are already critical of mainstream centralized social media. Why worry about doing it here when a single comment on reddit can reach millions of people when lemmy doesn’t even have as many users combined as some of the subs over on reddit.
This guy is a clown, regardless. I had an interaction with him on another thread where he edited his comment to make himself look like he predicted my response lmao. He also refuses to elaborate on some of the good faith response comments from other users because he knows his viewpoint is indefensible.
did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?
Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.
I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don’t “pay for a product you sre the product”, everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that’s their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren’t free, as you yourself said, content creators aren’t free, the engineers working on YouTube aren’t free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.
well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?
OMG but the people I base my entire personality on use that platform, ergo, everyone needs to vicariously support me thought them, and any maneuver to the contrary is an attack on the very core of my essence!
-ITT
I’ve blocked maybe eight people in thirty minutes who are implicitly demanding that corporations create the law.
And one of them immediately down voted you. I wonder why they’re here on Lemmy instead of continuing to support Reddit? They clearly like to be bottoms to corpos.
We must trust our corporate overlords who will use AI to guide us in their right direction.
Everyone I don’t agree with == bootlicker 🙄
Are you arguing people should only try to be correct when it benefits a poor person? When being correct benefits a rich person we should just lie about the truth?
Then stop making stupid arguments, it only serves to make you look stupid
How very mature
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
Honestly, there is plenty of stuff I’d pay for but I pirate if it’s difficult to access.
I don’t know, I probably would have paid for at least half the things I pirate if I had to (especially books).
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren’t infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube’s bandwidth isn’t free.
Another thing: footage provided em by content creators trains their LLM and it’s poorly paid, everybody seems to have a Patreon these days, every creator that wouldn’t be there if there was no money to be made (via said method and those live donations). So the apparent loss of money is more than compensated by the data usefulness. Then ads came. And they were few and it was fine. Then ads became insufferable. My presence there already guarantees creators output content that Google exploits for their AI. What else do I have to pay?
Let’s say I provide them with useful data with what I watch then. They know my age cos I log in and all my other info from Google services. That’s prolly why unblocked ads on the phone or tablet are always on point.
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy.
The same way it is piracy to go to the bathroom during the commercials…
Look, the problem at hand is not if people use adblocker or not, the problem here is how Google check if you are using adblocker or not, which seems to be illegal.
Well, the full “check for adblocker” things seems to be illegal in EU, whatever way it is used, given a sentence from 2016
I don’t think it’s piracy exactly but I fully realize there would not be a huge video site like YouTube without ads or limiting it to paid subscribers.
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
You’re missing the point/s
- 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.
A public good? Like roads, firefighters, etc? You want the government to pay for your Youtube Premium subscription?
Less snarky, if you’re arguing that Youtube has earned a special legal status, a natural consequence is that Google gets to play by a different rulebook from all other competitors. That’s quite a dangerous direction to take.
Your snark was actually closer to the mark than you think.
Let’s say YouTube vanished overnight, what would the impact be? Sarcasm might suggest “we’d all be more productive” but let’s take a deeper look.
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A lot of free courses (or parts thereof) would vanish. (A key resource for poorer learners)
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Most modern tech repair guides would be gone (no machine breakdowns, no guides on fixing errors on old hardware)
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A lot of people’s voices would be silenced (YouTube is an awful platform, but for some people it’s one of the only ones they have)
Seems to me, it would do a lot of public harm. Probably more harm than removing a freeway or closing a fire station.
As for letting Google “play by a different rulebook”, it does so already. The OP has indicated that they’re undertaking an action in an illegal way, and yet no-one much cares to stop them. Yes, they could do the same thing via legal channels, but that’s rather like suggesting there is no difference between threats of violence vs taking someone to court when trying to collect money.
Would you grant an insurance company similar legal indemnity? How would you feel about your local barber peeking in your window and selling what they see? Google has long played by a different rulebook, and thus different expectations are held.
Your arguments would only work if you’d argue for breaking up or nationalizing YouTube.
As long as they are a for-profit company you can’t deny them the right to legally earn money the way they see fit, doesn’t matter how big they are or what other revenue streams they have. Forcing them to offer a service for free is nonsense, and attacking them on a technicality that is probably easily circumvented is just a waste of everybody’s time and money imo.
If we really want to do something about this then we have to break their monopoly, same as any other huge company that’s f*cking with consumers.
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Removed by mod
Err, going through threads of conversations on both reddit and lemmy regarding YouTube, one would assume ad free access is the norm and Google even daring to offer Youtube Premium is a bad thing.
I feel offering Youtube Premium while still tracking the users online movement is indeed a bad thing.
I get what you are saying, but you could argue that google is pretty much a monopoly at this point, using their power trying to extract money from customers they could never do if their was any real competition with a similar number of channels and customers.
I think most users see google/youtube as a “the internet”, or a utility as important as power, water and heat. And don’t forget that google already requires users to “pay” for their services with data and ads in other services (maps, search, mail) as well.
So because they earn money somewhere else they should do something else for free? Why? What does Google owe us?
They only have the monopoly if we give it to them. I find their model fair, I use their service a lot. if they overprice me I’ll find another form of entertainment.
But you are right, people see YouTube as a necessity at this point. I’m trying to remind you, it’s not.
YouTube is a lot more than just entertainment. Not trying to argue your overall point just pointing that out.
That’s fair
So because they earn money somewhere else they should do something else for free?
Obviously not, but there is nothing to stop Google from making Youtube a paid service and drop that charade about adblockers.
Google’s main source of income is ads across the board, so fighting adblockers is certainly in their best interest
And users blocking all ads as long as Google is illegally tracking their online movement is in their best interest as well.
Fine. But it need to fight by the rules.
It is not up to discussion: Youtube want to serve video to EU user ? They need to follow EU rules. If the rule says that adblocker detection technologies (or attempt) are illegal Youtube has no really a say in it.
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.
Nope, but it is legally required to ask for permission to look into my device for data that it does not need to provide the serice.
Of course Google could make money, it just need to make them without violating the laws.
It’s all well and good that Google want to make money from my data - but they should be paying me for it. The value of my data isn’t from the data itself, but what can be done with it.
You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts.
They are. They provide you with a service for your data. It’s called YouTube. And if they don’t have a place to show you ads, the data is useless because no one will use it. It’s a closed loop.
And even if you don’t agree with it, it’s still a company selling a service and it can do whatever it wants to earn money from it. There’s nothing unethical about that.
No, it is not an exchange of data for access to the website. The website is provided completely free, and the data collection is the small print. A normal contract exchanges one thing for another, then the details are in the fine print. If it were an exchange of data for access, then the amount of data they collect would be proportional.
Why? Who made the rules about exchanging data? And it is an exchange of data for a service, it’s just not as obvious as you might want it to be. But nothing comes for free.
Hey I’m not saying I like the big company ethic scathing that’s been going on around the world, but it is how our society currently works.
Why? Who made the rules about exchanging data?
There’s a whole area of legislation called contract law. An exchange of value requires consideration, ie payment. They invite you in for free, then take your data without consideration. In particular, you only have use of the website while you visit it and so long as they host it in that current form, but they claim rights to your data in perpetuity. They have no obligation to continue hosting the website, because that is a separate arrangement to the data collection.
It’s how things have been going so far, but the law always takes a long time to catch up with new innovation. The law is not always right or comprehensive, which is why it has a facility to be changed. The GDPR cookie splash screen was the first real attempt at this, it falls well short but if everything works as it should then further laws should come.
Frankly though, I think what should happen is that businesses should be allowed to continue collecting data as they are, but their raw dataset should be publicly available for a small nominal fee. This way Google et al can still keep their proprietary data processing magic to themselves, but everyone can make use of the datasets and drive competition. It also gives people a reasonable opportunity to actually see their data, and act accordingly.
Businesses will complain about giving away “their” data, but the reality is that the data belongs to the users and the business merely has a licence. The cat is already out of the bag and it’s not practicable to put it back in, so the best choice is to embrace it openly.
Unrecognized entitlement on their part, lol.
the data that is physically within your system is yours alone.
Actually, ALL the data Google has on you is yours. Google do not own the data, neither do reddit, Facebook or anyone else. They merely have a licence.
Personally I think even that is illegal. Contracts require consideration, you exchange x for y, then you have details in the terms and conditions. This is like “come in for free!” and then everything is in the terms and conditions. If you look at insurance, they’re required to have a key facts page to bring to the front the main points from the terms in plain English. The cookie splash screen doesn’t really do this, as it obfuscates just how much data they collect, and is for the most part unenforceable as you can’t see what data they hold. Furthermore, the data they collect isn’t proportional to your use of the website.
The whole thing flies in the face of the core principles of contract law under which all trading is done. They tell us our data has no value and it isn’t worth the hassle of us getting paid, yet they use that data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. We might not know how to make use of that data, and you’ll need a lot of other data to build something to sell, but a manufacturer of nuts and bolts doesn’t know how to build a car - yet they still get paid for a portion of the value derived from their product through others’ work, as most of the value comes from what you can do with it. We’re all being robbed, every single one of us, including politicians and lawmakers.
Very good point.
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.
Fuck that noise. Advertising as a whole is mostly immoral, we just got used to it.
Marketing in general is a reason we live in a consumer society.
The only reason marketing exist is to trick our brains into buying stuff we do not need.
I’d say ban all of it. The world would be better off.
Uh. It’s not immoral to read the data they’ve served to you on the page they’re visiting on their own website. I’m honestly genuinely curious what moral argument you could make, here
they are taking information from your browser without getting your permission first, to use that information against you.
They’d argue that you going to their page which you know is sustained by ads is consent enough to check whether you’re using ad block. It’s an implicit thing, like how when you go to a restaurant you’re implying that you’re going to pay the bill afterward. You can’t eat and then leave saying, “well technically I never explicitly agreed to pay for this meal, it’s your fault for not asking before serving me.”
They’re taking information from the page they served you and runs the code they wrote to read the page they served you to ensure what they served you is actually what you’re seeing
You’re accessing the site, you’re continuing to use the site, you are implicitly agreeing to allow the code they run to modify the page you’re on
I fail to see how it specifically being used to check that ads are displaying is any different from code running normally in your browser to change the page without refreshing the page entirely
More importantly and actually on subject: how is this immoral? What moral code are they breaking here? You can argue legal semantics, but legality is not morality. You made a moral argument. How is this immoral?
Google is tracking you on every website that has a “share to Google” icon.
Which means Google has your entire browser history, even if you use Firefox.
If it was just on their own websites, nobody would be complaining.
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Youtube makes money off of adblocked users.
They send your watch habit aggregate data profiles to the number crunchers at alphabet hq, to sell off.
They make fuckloads of money off the free video content theyre given as well as the nonstop data stream of demographics data. Thats why alphabet bought it in the first place.
The ads are just bonus cash. They dont want to miss an opportunity to score more money by selling ad space in their data profile mines.
They are being fully compensated by me logging in and feeding them either free labor as video content or free money as data profiles. They can easily keep the lights on off that alone. They dont need more free cash.
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I am not obligated to sit dutifully with the volume up when ads play on my tv.
Nor am I obligated to allow ads to load within my browser.
They send the data they want me to display, down to every element on the page. It is fully within my rights to choose which elements are allowed to load on my computer.
And I wont be fuckin guilt tripped that the billion dollar company will make a fraction of another billion less dollars this quarter over my decisions to do so.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the typical terms of service or privacy policy even mention that you, as a user, have the power to reject tracking cookies, tracking pixels, etc. via your browser configuration and third party tools? As far as I know, the YouTube ToS and Privacy Policy also mention these things. I just tried to read it but they seem to have broken it up into a sprawling multi-site multi-page document where I can’t find the legalese to ctrl+f and pore over.
Can anyone find these documents, so I can read through them please?
Edit:
I found it: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en#intro
There are other ways to control the information Google collects whether or not you’re signed in to a Google Account, including:
- Browser settings: For example, you can configure your browser to indicate when Google has set a cookie in your browser. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. But remember that our services rely on cookies to function properly, for things like remembering your language preferences.
- Device-level settings: Your device may have controls that determine what information we collect. For example, you can modify location settings on your Android device.
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it’s immoral
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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 ?
All they need to implement ad block detection is user consent, which they likely cover on their terms of service and privacy policy.
Because of GDPR, in the EU user consent has to be explicitly asked for and given, not implicitly via some catch all in a 20 pages Terms Of Service.
Hence all the cookie pop-ups.
That is addressed in the source I linked, which is an industry groups advice to publishers on the implementation of ad block detector. They specifically say that having it listed in your ToS is a defensible strategy but could have some risk. To mitigate the risk, you can introduce either a consent banner, consent wall, or both.
It’s an interesting read, and something I wish I’d had a few years ago in a prior role when I wrote my organizations gdpr strategy, though I’m not an expert on EU specific law.
“Defensible strategy” doesn’t mean much until it goes to court and gets tested - just look at all those Cookie Popups in the early days with “user must uncheck everything to Reject” anti-patterns which ended up being ruled as not valid per the GDPR which is why nowadays all the major websites have “Reject All” buttons in those.
So far on everything that had not yet been explicitly clarified, when it did the ball has consistently fallen on the side of explicit user consent on colleting any “user identifying” data beyond that which is technically required for operation and Ad Blocking is not a tecnical requirement for the operation of a video sharing website.
Indeed, it ultimatelly will need to be tested in court. My point is that relying on an expectation that a court will rule that the collection of user private information for remote processing related to a functionality which is not technically required without explicit user consent is ok if there’s some entry somewhere in the ToS, is quite the wild bet as that would be a massive loophole on the GDPR, and further, even if that that did happen, relying on Commission not rush to close such a massive loophole is also a wild bet.
I suppose that’s my point though. Most of this thread, and the page linked have been asserting clear and unequivocal violation of gdpr, but that doesn’t appear to be true. It hasn’t been tested or ruled on authoritatively, and the technical mechanism makes s difference as well. There is room to equivocate.
My own personal opinion is that I doubt the EU policy makers or courts will treat the mechanism to ensure the delivery of ads with as much skepticism as they treat tracking, fingerprinting, and other things that violate privacy. Courts and policy interpreters often think of the intent of a law, and I don’t think the intent of GDPR was to potentially undermine ad supported business.
My goal in replying throughout the thread has been to address what feels like misinformation via misplaced certainty. I’m all for explicit consent walls, but most people in this thread don’t seem to be taking an objective look at things.
For some reason your link doesn’t load. Is it this? https://iabeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20160516-IABEU_Guidance_AdBlockerDetection.pdf
Yep that’s it. I’ll double check the link in my post.
Edit: yep borked the link, fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
It’s not even clear to me that the mechanism they’re using today is problematic. I don’t know what it is, but the author seems to think they do but aren’t sharing details beyond “trust me bro”. I agree that some kind of inspection-based detection might run afoul of the law, but I don’t see why that’s necessary. All you need to know is that the client is requesting videos without any of the ad requests making it through, which is entirely server-side.
Exactly.
But people are hell bent on “Google doing this, bad”.
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???
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
Definetly not if you are not registered. And likely if you are not logged in. This is EU, not US.
You can’t bypass laws, but the law in question only requires permission of the enduser. Getting this permission in your ToS isn’t bypassing anything, it’s acting according to the law.
that’s not true in the EU.
the reason those cookie banners are everywhere, for example, is because the EU requires explicit consent for a lot of things that used to be covered by ToS.
simply putting clauses into your ToS doesn’t shield the company from legal action at all.
regardless of what’s written in the ToS, final say over what is and isn’t legal lies with local authorities, not YouTube.
Here is a guide from a publisher trade group on the implementation of ad block detectors under gdpr.
It says that listing the use in your ToS is a defensible strategy but could have some risk. If the organization wants to further limit risk, they can add a consent banner, consent wall, or both.
My guess is Google is the risk accepting type on this issue and it’s willing to litigate to argue that its ToS is sufficient or the way they implement it differs from cookies. Either way, they could completely make this go away by asking a consent for ad delivery to their cookie notice.
The TOS holds no weight in EU courts.
No matter what some companies want you to believe. That is why they call it a risk.
They could easily put a “consent” requirement to access
And in the war you probably also sided with the Nazis because ‘well they invaded already, might as well give up’
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The same EU that threaten E2EE?
The EU has its faults, too, like this BS about sacrificing encryption. Overall, there seem to be a lot of benefits reigning in big companies, though.
Who else is looking out for their citizens? I think some congresspeople in the US ask tough questions, but in the end, business just goes on as usual.
Yes, the same EU. The fact that it’s considering some poor choices doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s actions thus far have been positive and deserve appreciation. Real Life doesn’t split people neatly into heroes and villains.
Don’t be an asshole and blame regular people for shit like this. This is because of big tech
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Those are still actions made by the tech companies. Blaming people for not complaining enough is not the best take on this. Just shifts the blame to the public, not to the people who made those decisions in the first place
This is the same chicken / egg thing as plastic pollutions.
Sure consumers choice of whether to discard or recycle a plastic straw is nothing compared to the decisions of corporations, but then consumers invest in those companies, buy their products, and elect representatives who do not hold them accountable.
Big tech has ruined the internet because people were willing to trade their privacy and their attention in order to watch gifs of cats playing the piano. I’m not “blaming” people for that - hell, I was one of them, but you can’t solve the problem without understanding how it’s perpetuated.
Strictly speaking, management at Big Tech are all normies and they make the decisions.
I think the point is solid: non-tech-people sell capabilities to other non-tech-people to make money, and this forms a feedback loop and drives direction. A non-big-tech world is wildly different because it’s more like tech people building an environment for doing things with other tech people.
Management of big tech are excessively rich assholes. The rich, by the very definition, do not fall into the category of “normal people”
Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. Is everyone that’s not you a normie? Or is normie a ‘normal person’, which then absolutely does not include rich managers of big tech companies?
Really strange point to make, man.
The normies support big tech, they love it. They probably work for big tech, or wish they did, or at least imagine themselves as the next Elon Musk.
Touch grass bud.
“Don’t be an asshole”? As a response to a short three sentence statement where no one was an asshole…
I think you’re the fucking asshole regardless of how much blame “big tech” and corporations in general bare here.
Slow the fuck down.
It’s not the sheep’s fault they’re led to the meat grinder
If a private company has to succeed, it has to offer things ** that normies want.** FB/G is shit because this is what normies consume - the ego-display, the dopamine kick. In every enshittification of a service, there is a history of it being cravingly indulged by the mass. Now when the companies started rising up and used their monopoly, they (the normies) are realizing they have been shit-eating for a long time. One may argue the companies were not so in the beginning, but that would be a very myopic view.
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But they weren’t led. They were convinced by big tech. But in the end they choose to go into the meat grinder themselves.
But they weren’t led. They were convinced by…
Same difference man
“Normies”? Seriously?
Because “normies” are responsible for the entshitification of the Internet right?
As much as I loathe that term, it could be argued that they indirectly are.
The massive increase in the amount of people online made it profitable for companies to be online. Lack of regulations and the inability for regulators to keep up with technological advancements allowed companies to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. The complete inability of government to prevent monetary influence on legislature has prevented good regulations from developing. The fact that the average person online uses maybe five websites in total and doesn’t engage further means that most issues fly under the radar of the average person, which limits the ability of any significant amount of constituents to pressure the politicians supposedly representing them to do better, and limits the overall impact of any movement away from shitty sites to better ones.
It’s a tangled yarn ball, but one that would struggle to exist without a majority of people to pull money from who just do not care about any of the shit that people more deeply invested in the internet care about.
Honestly, I see your argument. I don’t fully agree with it, but thank you for enlightening me.
They’re also trying to wiretap the whole thing… pay attention to EVERYTHING that’s in a bill, not just the clickbait stuff you agree with.
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
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.
Fuck yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. California is the only reason we don’t have products giving insta-cancer ect.
Cool, so YouTube will start putting pop ups that require you to consent to the detection in order to watch videos. That’s what everyone did with the whole cookies thing when that was determined to be illegal without consent.
that would be illegal too, because that information is not strictly necessary for their service - they could only opt to not provide the service in the eu
I don’t agree. They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model, so it is necessary to advertise. Therefore it is necessary for them to block access to those blocking advertising. The directive cited isn’t intended to make advertiser supported services effectively illegal in the EU. That would be a massive own goal. It’s intended to make deceptive and unnecessary data collection illegal. Nothing YouTube is doing is deceptive. They’re being very clear about their intention to advertise to non-subscribers.
They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model,
Couldn’t that claim be countered by pointing out that they already deploy a for pay approach called youtube premium?
No, because businesses have multiple revenue streams. YouTube has a subscription offering, and a free, advertiser-supported offering. Both are part of their business model.
alright
There are multiple French websites that do this. It is legal (otherwise these websites would not do this anymore, it’s been a while).
There is a popup asking you if you consent to get cookies (for advertisement). If you say “no”, it leads you to another popup with two choices :- Change your decision and accept cookies
- Pay for a premium service without advertisements
That is just because the people who enforce the EDPB guidelines just haven’t come around to fining those websites.
That practice is still illegal.
Want to speed up the process? You can report those websites. The more reports the faster those get punished.
No, that’s not that clear for the moment.
Let me explain the French case :
- Webedia is a big company that owns most of the famous French websites (jeuxvideo.com , etc.). All these websites have cookie walls with an alternative : a paid subsription. What they say, is that the website is now accessible with subscription only. However, if you accept cookies, you’ll get a discount (free access).
- The CNIL (a big French governemental entity) tried to forbid this. If someone reports a website, it’s for this entity to take action. There is no need to report Webedia, the CNIL knows already :-)
- The Conseil d’Etat (juridical entity of the French gov) said that “non”, it’s OK for Webedia to use such paywalls. The CNIL can’t forbid Webedia to use them.
- The CNIL asked the jusrists at the European level… here we are. We still don’t know.
Here is a French website where the CNIL explains this :
https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookie-walls-la-cnil-publie-des-premiers-criteres-devaluationWell, seems like my gdpr knowledge got too rusty. at least to me its an interesting topic to actualise
Same in Germany and Switzerland. I just close the site immediately when I see this kind of blackmailing. Or use 12ft.io if I absolutely want to read the article.
Nothing more fun than having to go through some websites shitty settings to toggle everything off.
I can heartily recommend Consent-O-Matic. I’d say that it’s able to clear (and reject by default) the cookie warnings on 95% of the sites I visit.
ublock does it too if you enable the “block annoyances” option in the settings
I don’t know why I have not yet donated to these developers. They sure as hell deserve it. As soon as I get home they’re gonna get some moneys!
sadly they’re not accepting donations
I bet the list maintainers accept tips!
At the bottom of the uBlock Origin homepage there’s links to the most popular list homepages which would be a good starting point.
The Peter Lowe’s ad tracking list links to its own Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/blocklist (Confirm by clicking on the link at the uBlock Origin homepage, then at the top click on patreon).
The other ones I couldn’t find any obvious way to donate to the list maintainers.
Sadly, no ublock for me on Safari, but good to know!
Don’t use stupid browsers then ;-)
Duckduckgo browser does it too
Still a curveball. Collecting your data and having to say ot to your face are not the same.
Would be a shame if your answer to that consent question was not saved and would be required to answer each time you open up a video.
which you could get around by using another frontend for youtube or just going with vlc all the way by playing the url in vlc directly.
Firefox’s ‘Play in VLC’ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-in-vlc/ is brilliant for this - it does entire playlists too. It works with smpalyer, which is even better player than VLC, IMO.
A lot of the cookie notifications can’t collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying “opt-out” workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > ‘Filter lists’ and enable the “EasyList - Cookie Notices” you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they’re following the law, you shouldn’t be tracked.
I only just posted a meme about the EU flooring companies for going against their regulations. It was my first post too :)
I’d really like to add YouTube to it. Godspeed.
Thank fuck for EU and GDPR
… We’re gonna get another cookie click-through, aren’t we?
Another three cheers for the EU! 🇪🇺🍻🥂
EU to the rescue again!
Don’t ask how, but my dad found out that at least with Ublock, cleaning the cache in the addon makes it bypass the stupid pop-up.
I am not paying for Premium again until they bring the dislike button back.
I am not paying for Premium.
It was pathetic for them to hide away this button with its statistics. Honestly it’s an valuable tool.
Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
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
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.
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?
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
There are ways to get Twitch adblock as well. I use PurpleTV
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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.
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… 😂
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.
It depends on the context, but generally you require explicit permission for data-related stuff which means something like a checkbox or a signature.
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.
