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Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

70 points by nixass 3y ago

DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
gumballindie 3y ago
I fail to understand the economics behind this. If google cant show ads, and people dont want to pay for a subscription, how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running? It’s not a public service, they have to monetise somehow.
- t0mas88 3y ago
  They are free to make it a paid subscription service, no legal challenge there. 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.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s still to be decided whether that’s illegal and the most likely outcome would be a switch to a fail safe approach: don’t detect an ad blocker, validate that the ad played. That’s not perfect of course but they have billions of dollars to fund it.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Use of adblockers has been pretty constant over time and YT has existed through that entire time. There doesn't seem to be any danger of this scenario actually happening. "Normies" just don't care enough to install adblock.
- astronads 3y ago
  They don’t have an inherent right to exist or be profitable. If the EU agrees this violates GDPR then they will have to adapt or die.
  - ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
    And EU would have to cave after people complain that YouTube, tiktok, every news site, reddit, the entire internet becomes nothing more than a pay wall to them. 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.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      Not necessarily, if the enforcement of these regulations allows domestic competitors (that respect the GDPR) to appear? 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?
      - Aerroon 3y ago
        And how would that domestic competitor make money? Can't use ads, can't charge a subscription fee. What else? Where would this domestic competitor even get the content from? Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        You can charge a subscription fee. You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative. 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?
        belltaco 3y ago
        > You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative. 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.
- jalgos_eminator 3y ago
  How does Netflix make money? HBO Max? Apple TV? Amazon Prime Video? 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.
  - eek2121 3y ago
    Well, Netflix DOES control how you view video in your browser, however. Open a video in Firefox? No 4K for you. Hardware DRM is also used. Don’t have an HDCP-enabled display/GPU/Driver? Low bitrate welcomes you.
- znpy 3y ago
  > how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running 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.
- nurple 3y ago
  The internet before huge conglomerates started stealing and monetizing people's content through forced network effects would have absolutely blown your mind then.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    The pixels were sometimes larger than my thumb though. And every video was cut into short segments.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > every video was cut into short segments 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).
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        Early in YT history you could leave a video page open and it would buffer an entire video. Was great on slow connections, but buffering a 10 minute video versus buffering a 10h video way certainly different in terms of server load.
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      P2P systems were able to deliver dvd rips 15 years ago, and even normies knew how to use them. Cheap, robust, high quality media delivery is a political problem, not a technical one.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    You guys are so naïve. The answer is that everyone will end up on a Chinese clone of Youtube which will simply ignore GDPR.
    - malermeister 3y ago
- gtowey 3y ago
  I think there are two aspects to this which are worth challenging. 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.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  Google has enough cash and is big enough. I want it to be smaller and less powerful, the economics of this is that we are tired of superpowerful Google.
- mordae 3y ago
  I want YouTube to become just one in the many competing video hosting services with various business and ownership models. I mostly like how nebula.tv runs their business (being owned collectively by the authors themselves, flat fee, no ads). Maybe we can have more of those instead?
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Isn't that the whole premise of capitalism? If one business can't profitably exist (or can no longer exist due to changing market conditions or regulation) then something else will take its place if it's able to deliver the same service for cheaper?
ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
If people succeed in codifying 'their right' to block ads, how would the internet not be doomed to die as is, or at best aggressively centralize even more. 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.
- ufish235 3y ago
  This is the concept behind BAT and the Brave browser, isn’t it?
- errantmind 3y ago
  People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising. Ads are not necessary for all content on the web and, personally, I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
  - caesil 3y ago
    Fine, then don't use YouTube. But don't yank away from the rest of us the ability to trade ads for useful free services.
    - ktosobcy 3y ago
      Noone will force you to use adblock so what the heck are you whining about?
      - acdha 3y ago
        YouTube costs money to run and videos cost money to make. If enough people think they’re entitled to use other people’s work without paying them, that doesn’t work and the free video will disappear or get worse. Content moves behind subscription requirements, videos will have a lot more integrated sponsorship ads, and quality will decline as more people will be creating cheap video aimed at easy monetization options.
TekMol 3y ago
The world is such an interesting place at the moment. 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.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > what does Europe have to take part in world trade? Build actual physical goods that all this bullshit "services" economy nevertheless requires and takes for granted?
  - TekMol 3y ago
    Building physical goods is a service too. 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?
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    The US does both though.
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  So what is the solution here? Get rid of protective regulations? Nah. If humans are irrelevant, the. We have an entirely different set of problems to solve anyways, and no reasonable way to predict what the solutions would be. In the meantime in the present, I’m more than happy to keep consumer protection regulation, until there is a non-speculative argument to be had, but then at that point the discussion would have to be on the merits of the new situation.
  - TekMol 3y ago
    Why is there "no reasonable way to predict what the solutions would be" in a world where work is done by AI? The US already has a solution. Build that AI and charge others to use it. Same as they do with "old school" software.
robd003 3y ago
Google makes enough money from adwords that they can afford one public good like a free video sharing website.
- mbrumlow 3y ago
  The idea that this anti blockers is a privacy issue is silly. 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.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    I think was is absurd is this premise that youtube has just been hemmorhaging money for google all of its life. Google has never been perfectly forthcoming about their finances on this but most analysis over the years have suggested that this is not some charity product for the world, but a major component of googles profits. Even if it were just that, why start squeezing for pennies when you are at a 1.5 trillion market cap? Why so desperate for a few percentage points more? That move alone should tell investors to decamp and diversify if alphabet feels like they don’t have better strategies than this.
- tomComb 3y ago
  Shouldn’t the one public free good be something like alphafold, not YouTube.
- danielbln 3y ago
  That's not how public companies work, shareholders would sue in fact. If Google was private they could to whatever they want (see Valve), but they're not, so they don't.
charcircuit 3y ago
The claim is that ad blocker detection scripts violate. 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. Detecting if a request to Google's servers for an ad fails is not the same thing as gaining access to information stored in a user's device.
- t0mas88 3y ago
  They're running a javascript on the device that is not needed to deliver the service. And that script accesses attributes of the browser. That's illegal without user consent. If they would detect this server side it wouldn't be illegal.
  - mbrumlow 3y ago
    You just declared a bunch of stuff illegal without even knowing a thing about them. 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.
    - t0mas88 3y ago
      Read again, and retry :-) because you've missed the key distinction: required for delivery of the requested service. That's how the e-privacy directive works. Doesn't matter whether you agree with it, it's legal fact in Europe. 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.
beached_whale 3y ago
What I don’t understand is why doesn’t Google just insert the adverts into the video stream from the main video itself. Default to current, if the user goes over a certain time without playing an advert, insert it.
- looperhacks 3y ago
  Re-encoding is probably too expensive. And storing the same variant for everyone would effectively double the storage requirement (for ad-free users) and will be quickly defeated with Sponsorblock
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Re-encoding is difficult but you don't necessarily have to do that. As far as I know it's possible to just splice segments of video between "key" frames without otherwise re-encoding the full video. 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.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  The argument I've heard against this is its much harder to report views this way. It basically becomes an honor system between Google and the advertiser, when today its the user getting the ad, so it's easier to verify. Google is big enough where they could eventually do this most likely, but smaller sites won't have the 'credit' to pull this off.
- enlyth 3y ago
  That sounds like it would take way too much processing power. Google is not like Twitch where relatively few streams are served to many millions, it's more like many millions of videos to many millions of users.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  With SponsorBlock, blocking such ads on YouTube is already a solved problem for sufficiently popular videos. Unless YouTube goes further and disables seeking during the portion of the video with ads. Then we're back to ad blockers removing some page functionality (the Javascript that disables seeking).
ktosobcy 3y ago
It would be nice if we could actually get rid of the ads from meatspace altogether... It would be sooo much better...
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Some cities have banned billboards and taken back their streetscape as a result
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    I know, I was thinking about https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Metamorfoza-Wrzeszcza-po-uchwale-krajobrazowej-n152416.html https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Metamorfoza-Wrzeszcza-p... - it looks sooo much better
ranting-moth 3y ago
YT ads didn't bother me that much in the past. But 2-3 years ago something happened on YT. They became incredibly frequent and even more obnoxious. So I stopped seeing YT ads :) But I saw one yesterday by mistake. A scam trying to sell me some sort of infinite energy device.
n_ary 3y ago
Discalimer: Didn't read TFA. 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).
- true_religion 3y ago
  I run a media site on the low end of popularity (about 200k MAU). In 2015, we were able to make 36k a month with merely 2 banner ads per page, and one sponsored link. Now, we make 7k. 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.
  - eek2121 3y ago

70 points by nixass 3y ago

[dead]

I fail to understand the economics behind this. If google cant show ads, and people dont want to pay for a subscription, how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running? It’s not a public service, they have to monetise somehow.

t0mas88 3y ago
They are free to make it a paid subscription service, no legal challenge there. 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.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s still to be decided whether that’s illegal and the most likely outcome would be a switch to a fail safe approach: don’t detect an ad blocker, validate that the ad played. That’s not perfect of course but they have billions of dollars to fund it.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Use of adblockers has been pretty constant over time and YT has existed through that entire time. There doesn't seem to be any danger of this scenario actually happening. "Normies" just don't care enough to install adblock.
astronads 3y ago
They don’t have an inherent right to exist or be profitable. If the EU agrees this violates GDPR then they will have to adapt or die.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
  And EU would have to cave after people complain that YouTube, tiktok, every news site, reddit, the entire internet becomes nothing more than a pay wall to them. 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.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Not necessarily, if the enforcement of these regulations allows domestic competitors (that respect the GDPR) to appear? 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?
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      And how would that domestic competitor make money? Can't use ads, can't charge a subscription fee. What else? Where would this domestic competitor even get the content from? Steal it from YouTube/TikTok?
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        You can charge a subscription fee. You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative. 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?
        belltaco 3y ago
        > You can even use untargeted ads as an alternative. 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.
jalgos_eminator 3y ago
How does Netflix make money? HBO Max? Apple TV? Amazon Prime Video? 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.
- eek2121 3y ago
  Well, Netflix DOES control how you view video in your browser, however. Open a video in Firefox? No 4K for you. Hardware DRM is also used. Don’t have an HDCP-enabled display/GPU/Driver? Low bitrate welcomes you.
znpy 3y ago
> how are they going to be able to keep youtube up and running 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.
nurple 3y ago
The internet before huge conglomerates started stealing and monetizing people's content through forced network effects would have absolutely blown your mind then.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  The pixels were sometimes larger than my thumb though. And every video was cut into short segments.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > every video was cut into short segments 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).
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Early in YT history you could leave a video page open and it would buffer an entire video. Was great on slow connections, but buffering a 10 minute video versus buffering a 10h video way certainly different in terms of server load.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    P2P systems were able to deliver dvd rips 15 years ago, and even normies knew how to use them. Cheap, robust, high quality media delivery is a political problem, not a technical one.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  You guys are so naïve. The answer is that everyone will end up on a Chinese clone of Youtube which will simply ignore GDPR.
  - malermeister 3y ago
gtowey 3y ago
I think there are two aspects to this which are worth challenging. 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.
meiraleal 3y ago
Google has enough cash and is big enough. I want it to be smaller and less powerful, the economics of this is that we are tired of superpowerful Google.
mordae 3y ago
I want YouTube to become just one in the many competing video hosting services with various business and ownership models. I mostly like how nebula.tv runs their business (being owned collectively by the authors themselves, flat fee, no ads). Maybe we can have more of those instead?
Nextgrid 3y ago
Isn't that the whole premise of capitalism? If one business can't profitably exist (or can no longer exist due to changing market conditions or regulation) then something else will take its place if it's able to deliver the same service for cheaper?

ApolloFortyNine 3y ago

If people succeed in codifying 'their right' to block ads, how would the internet not be doomed to die as is, or at best aggressively centralize even more. 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.

ufish235 3y ago
This is the concept behind BAT and the Brave browser, isn’t it?
errantmind 3y ago
People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising. Ads are not necessary for all content on the web and, personally, I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.
- caesil 3y ago
  Fine, then don't use YouTube. But don't yank away from the rest of us the ability to trade ads for useful free services.
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    Noone will force you to use adblock so what the heck are you whining about?
    - acdha 3y ago
      YouTube costs money to run and videos cost money to make. If enough people think they’re entitled to use other people’s work without paying them, that doesn’t work and the free video will disappear or get worse. Content moves behind subscription requirements, videos will have a lot more integrated sponsorship ads, and quality will decline as more people will be creating cheap video aimed at easy monetization options.

TekMol 3y ago

The world is such an interesting place at the moment. 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.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> what does Europe have to take part in world trade? Build actual physical goods that all this bullshit "services" economy nevertheless requires and takes for granted?
- TekMol 3y ago
  Building physical goods is a service too. 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?
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  The US does both though.
LadyCailin 3y ago
So what is the solution here? Get rid of protective regulations? Nah. If humans are irrelevant, the. We have an entirely different set of problems to solve anyways, and no reasonable way to predict what the solutions would be. In the meantime in the present, I’m more than happy to keep consumer protection regulation, until there is a non-speculative argument to be had, but then at that point the discussion would have to be on the merits of the new situation.
- TekMol 3y ago
  Why is there "no reasonable way to predict what the solutions would be" in a world where work is done by AI? The US already has a solution. Build that AI and charge others to use it. Same as they do with "old school" software.

robd003 3y ago

Google makes enough money from adwords that they can afford one public good like a free video sharing website.

mbrumlow 3y ago
The idea that this anti blockers is a privacy issue is silly. 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.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I think was is absurd is this premise that youtube has just been hemmorhaging money for google all of its life. Google has never been perfectly forthcoming about their finances on this but most analysis over the years have suggested that this is not some charity product for the world, but a major component of googles profits. Even if it were just that, why start squeezing for pennies when you are at a 1.5 trillion market cap? Why so desperate for a few percentage points more? That move alone should tell investors to decamp and diversify if alphabet feels like they don’t have better strategies than this.
tomComb 3y ago
Shouldn’t the one public free good be something like alphafold, not YouTube.
danielbln 3y ago
That's not how public companies work, shareholders would sue in fact. If Google was private they could to whatever they want (see Valve), but they're not, so they don't.

charcircuit 3y ago

The claim is that ad blocker detection scripts violate. 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. Detecting if a request to Google's servers for an ad fails is not the same thing as gaining access to information stored in a user's device.

t0mas88 3y ago
They're running a javascript on the device that is not needed to deliver the service. And that script accesses attributes of the browser. That's illegal without user consent. If they would detect this server side it wouldn't be illegal.
- mbrumlow 3y ago
  You just declared a bunch of stuff illegal without even knowing a thing about them. 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.
  - t0mas88 3y ago
    Read again, and retry :-) because you've missed the key distinction: required for delivery of the requested service. That's how the e-privacy directive works. Doesn't matter whether you agree with it, it's legal fact in Europe. 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.

beached_whale 3y ago

What I don’t understand is why doesn’t Google just insert the adverts into the video stream from the main video itself. Default to current, if the user goes over a certain time without playing an advert, insert it.

looperhacks 3y ago
Re-encoding is probably too expensive. And storing the same variant for everyone would effectively double the storage requirement (for ad-free users) and will be quickly defeated with Sponsorblock
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Re-encoding is difficult but you don't necessarily have to do that. As far as I know it's possible to just splice segments of video between "key" frames without otherwise re-encoding the full video. 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.
ApolloFortyNine 3y ago
The argument I've heard against this is its much harder to report views this way. It basically becomes an honor system between Google and the advertiser, when today its the user getting the ad, so it's easier to verify. Google is big enough where they could eventually do this most likely, but smaller sites won't have the 'credit' to pull this off.
enlyth 3y ago
That sounds like it would take way too much processing power. Google is not like Twitch where relatively few streams are served to many millions, it's more like many millions of videos to many millions of users.
rented_mule 3y ago
With SponsorBlock, blocking such ads on YouTube is already a solved problem for sufficiently popular videos. Unless YouTube goes further and disables seeking during the portion of the video with ads. Then we're back to ad blockers removing some page functionality (the Javascript that disables seeking).

ktosobcy 3y ago

It would be nice if we could actually get rid of the ads from meatspace altogether... It would be sooo much better...

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Some cities have banned billboards and taken back their streetscape as a result
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  I know, I was thinking about https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Metamorfoza-Wrzeszcza-po-uchwale-krajobrazowej-n152416.html https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Metamorfoza-Wrzeszcza-p... - it looks sooo much better

ranting-moth 3y ago

YT ads didn't bother me that much in the past. But 2-3 years ago something happened on YT. They became incredibly frequent and even more obnoxious. So I stopped seeing YT ads :) But I saw one yesterday by mistake. A scam trying to sell me some sort of infinite energy device.

n_ary 3y ago

Discalimer: Didn't read TFA. 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).

true_religion 3y ago
I run a media site on the low end of popularity (about 200k MAU). In 2015, we were able to make 36k a month with merely 2 banner ads per page, and one sponsored link. Now, we make 7k. 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.
- eek2121 3y ago