6 ms·

YouTube may face criminal complaints in EU for using ad-block detection scripts

84 points by giuliomagnifico 3y ago

jruohonen 3y ago
A move to criminal law is certainly interesting development in this domain.
- gostsamo 3y ago
  this was discussed yesterday under a register article. should be noted that this is a private citizen's complaint and not initiated by the state.
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  Yeah, not really a fan. Youtube can attempt to ads. I can attempt to block those ads (and have succeeded without interruption so far lol). No need to get the govt involved.
  - jruohonen 3y ago
    > No need to get the govt involved. Well, states are already involved in the EU due to the GDPR, e-privacy directive, and other things. But the case is interesting from a legal perspective. Note that the complainant refers to Irish criminal law, but there is also Directive 2013/40/EU, which contains rather similar mandates. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A32013L0040 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...
    - MiddleEndian 3y ago
      So in terms of pro-privacy, yes, happy for the govt to get involved, possibly even if it's to the point where all internet users end up with the same privacy rights as under-13s. Although even then, have to be vigilant, with the EU and the US periodically trying to mandate "backdoors" into encrypted communications. My concern for govt choosing what can be displayed in terms of ads is a concern that the govt would then move into choosing what must be displayed, once some sort of agreement on what is "fair" to display is reached. I'd prefer the antagonistic free-for-all to continue, as it's pretty easy to block ads everywhere at the moment.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Google is a monopolist. Why shouldn't we regulate it differently than we regulate other companies?
    - MiddleEndian 3y ago
      Because sometimes legislation can end up with regulatory capture. If the govt reaches some sort of agreement with tech companies that results in some things (that we can already block) becoming illegal to display on their end, but other things now becoming illegal to block, that would be a worse result than the govt just doing nothing. Historically, when the govt gets involved, this is the result. Back when cable TV was relevant, Tivo lost a lawsuit filed against them for auto-skipping ads on recorded content. Although looking at the article, it just says "A privacy consultant based in Ireland says he is in the process of filing a criminal complaint against YouTube for alleged unlawful surveillance" so I would be surprised if anything came of this anyway.
      - Teever 3y ago
        Regulatory capture sounds like a criminal activity to me. I'm concerned with the mindet that we shouldn't punish criminal activity because the response from the criminals may be more criminal activity. I think that if we put criminals in jail they will have less opporunity to commit crime, both while they're in jail, and afterwards when they are released and still have a criminal record. Criminals should go to jail for criminal activities is not a controversial opinion.
        MiddleEndian 3y ago
        Currently they have not broken any laws while detecting ad blockers, besides what some guy declared. And historically, laws in this area have not been favorable to consumers. As far as data protection laws go, those could always be stricter and are a much better area of focus.
  - karmasimida 3y ago
    EU is all about over regulation, this is just what they do.
  - vasdae 3y ago
    It's the EU, of course they have to get involved. How else are they going to justify the salaries of those unelected officials?
Moldoteck 3y ago
why just yt? There are many more sites doing this
- thefounder 3y ago
  You have to start somewhere. If you take down something as big as YT the small cockroaches will be gone the next second.
  - allan_s 3y ago
    Exactly the prominent "continue without accepting" started to be prominent on banners and not burried below 3 clicks /redirection ONLY AFTER google had to put it on theirs Its the same as when a group bully you, you only need to bring down the big one
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  It's a giant site that'll be easier to bring to courts, and the EU has made plenty of tech regulation specifically against FAANG+. I don't think Youtube will lose this, but you'll have a lot more luck convincing a judge that Youtube is breaking the law than some blog spam news site.
zazazache 3y ago
While ads suck and I think this is a shitty move by YouTube, I I find it hard to argue against a company that runs on ads not having a legitimate interest in making sure that they are being able to display them on their own website. I think you could even make a good argument that YouTube MUST take appropriate measures to ensure that they display ads that have been paid for. To count impressions so they are able to bill their clients they need to do more or less the same things required to detect ad blocking.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  If we're going to make law that they must not under-count, lets also make law that they must not over-count. In fact, given that their interest is in higher count, the argument that "they must count correctly to avoid under-counting" doesn't make any sense.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rollcat 3y ago
  I have the exact opposite view. We need a law that guarantees end users the right to study and adapt software to fit their personal needs, especially in situations where vendors disregard accessibility (see the June 2023 Reddit API shitstorm and r/blind[1]). Ads are often loud and obnoxious. An ad blocker that turns the volume down (rather than blocking an ad entirely) could be seen as a means of improving accessibility. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently_announced_api_changes_and_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_rece...
- Larrikin 3y ago
  If I use Ad Nauseam, Google gets to deliver the ad on their website, the ad buyer gets the click so their marketing department can show how successful their campaign is, and I get to control what is displayed on MY computer with the side benefit of poisoning the data profile that attempts to track me around the entire internet regardless of whether I am paying for an ad free experience or not. Seems like a win for everyone.
QVVRP4nYz 3y ago
It was already covered in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210226 . IMHO this case makes no sense at all.
greybox 3y ago
Whatever I think about Google, I have a softspot for youtube. Youtube is an amazing resource for society, the amount of knowledge that humanity has stored on their servers is mind boggling. You can learn anything there from DIY Flooring installation to programming to Japanese. I've started entire years long side projects based on being inspired by something I've seen on youtube. I'm alright watching adds to see that resource remain free. I'm even alright with them not showing me videos if they detect I have my ad blocker on. That seems fair to me. I use firefox and have ublock origin turned on everywhere else on the web. I do think though that they should be separated from Google.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform. Videos that take a shitton of time and resources to make and are actually useful information-dense content don’t usually get enough viewers to pay for themselves with ads — their audience is way too small by definition — but some stupid low-effort viral shit that gets viewed by billions does.
  - greybox 3y ago
    Yess! I totally agree. My favorite creator has a patreon and I contribute that way. But the platform does have their costs to cover, they contribute to discoverability & host all the videos. But yes, creating good quality videos is a full time job that isn't compensated simply by relying on ad money.
  - izacus 3y ago
    > Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform. And where exactly will these creators publish their content if not on a platform? YouTube solves their techology problem, delivery problem, storage problem, costs problem for all the previous things and gets them access to advertisers that pay for their content and handles payments across the world for them. (Patreon is a platform too, which also works on handling a subset of those problems). I don't see those creators rushing to cover 6-7 figure AWS bandwidth, transcoding and software development costs themselves for their self hosted videos. They seem to be happy double dipping into YT ad paid service costs and adding sponsorships and patreons on top of that. I haven't seen a single one move to their own AWS hosted machines and paying 5-7 figures in badwidth and CPU costs to get their content delivered to people who want everything for free.
Ajay-p 3y ago
I continue to block ads on YouTube and have had no adverse warnings but I anticipate them eventually. Relevancy of the ads is an issue but I am more frustrated by the quality, repetitiveness, and many times the obnoxiousness of the ads. I will never, ever, purchase liberty insurance. I am sick and tired of the ostrich man. A company that blasts its obnoxious advertising holds the same place in my hatred as loud, used car dealers.
- tinrab 3y ago
  I keep getting a crypto trading bot ad with AI generated Elon Musk. Ad blockers are necessary.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  I only got 1 really obnoxious ad about finding out how much my car is worth (I don't own a car, I don't even have a license), but I can usually get rid of it by rerolling by reloading the page.
westurner 3y ago
Why do you pretend that you are entitled to free video storage and bandwidth from YouTube? You haven't been sleighted. That service costs money to provide. No, you don't have a right to free service either. Do you pay your other bills while you demand free rendered services from these companies? Having a disability or similar does not entitle you to an unsubsidized Times Square with no ads. (NASA is running their own streaming network and competing; it can be done. EU should try to run competing free video streaming businesses before shoving preferred American companies around with anti-competitive claims. EU haven't run a video hosting business that's been prevented from competing by the success, existence, and approved mergers and acquisitions of American media companies; and so EU video hosting businesses haven't and can't have been anti-conpetitively disadvantaged.) I also run ad blockers for various justifiable reasons; but I don't tell myself that I have a right to free shtuff. How the heck can you require only Netflix to host 30% local EU content and also demand free video streaming service with no ads?
- mchicken 3y ago
  I won't mind to watch some ADs from time to time. However, these guys have gotten too greedy with their advertisements and "buy premium" shit popping up every now and then. Heck, my experience without a blocker was that I had 2 freaking 15-second inserts every 5 minutes of video.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    It also changes the nature of the content. I was watching some sports videos this week and all the advertisements were for gambling websites. Meant I was no longer comfortable watching the content around children.
  - westurner 3y ago
    I think a lot of that is the (musical) artists/businesspeople demanding a higher - most reasonable - cut, so we all get more ads. Just think how expensive YouTube would be if artists started demanding royalties for works that match their video fingerprints (in addition to the payouts according to audio fingerprints that YouTube pioneered). Encoding, moderation, storage, and bandwidth cost money. I'm sure the YouTube financials and margin are posted. A video streaming service can afford to operate without ads only if: _____. You understand this if you've ever tried to host (multiply-reencoded) video on a shared hosting service with a bandwidth quota for $10-$20 a month. https://WebMonetization.org/ https://WebMonetization.org/ is one proposed solution to advertising-supported media.
ESMirro 3y ago
This is a publicity stunt. He’s simply gone to the Garda (Irish police) and reported a “crime” (that Google have apparently broken the law). The Garda will “investigate”, inevitably find that, no, the law designed to arrest blackhats breaking into computer systems does not cover this scenario despite its vague wording, and inform the complainant accordingly. A small waste of police time and taxpayer money, reported on by trashy clickbait websites as though it’s some meaningful event in order to drive arguments in the comments on the legitimacy of the complaint.
flanbiscuit 3y ago
Related anecdote: Just a couple days ago I was watching YouTube and the videos kept defaulting to 480p quality and not automatically increasing to a higher one. This was on my home network that is definitely able to handle a higher quality stream. I was able to manually set it to 720p (good enough for watching on my laptop) and it didn't flip back. This happened a few times in a row that I found it odd. I then thought it might be ad blocking related so I disabled uBlock Origin for YouTube and then everything worked fine after that. Coincidence? Maybe, I need to try this a few more times to see.
- bitvoid 3y ago
  There's an extension called Enhancer for YouTube (and probably others) that allows you to automatically set the quality without needing to do it manually. If your default quality setting is higher than a video offers, it'll choose the highest available. There's also other features like automatically expanding the video, converting Shorts to normal videos, automatically expanding the description, automatically hiding chat for live streams, etc.
endisneigh 3y ago
I doubt this will go anywhere, but it’s certainly a reminder for any in the EU who have lofty software monetization ambitions to take their talents elsewhere.
izacus 3y ago
I love how seriously HN takes a nothingburger about a seriously unfounded complaint from one guy. That didn't even pass a basic legal smell test.
hankman86 3y ago
I would love to see the EU’s Digital Markets Act be applied to YouTube. By all accounts, they are a gatekeeper of the user-generated video streaming market. The DML could enforce some increased level of interoperability. This would not only make youtube-dl legal, but also allow other platforms to sideload videos from YouTube. I would love to see other streaming services offer access to videos on YouTube for cheaper. YouTube‘s premium tier is exorbitantly expensive.
hankman86 3y ago
From an end user‘s personal, YouTube‘s ad block detector is unwanted malware, running on hardware that YouTube does not own. If there is no law against that, then there should be. Let’s face it, the advertising and data harvesting revenue model of the Web has done so much damage, it deserves to be dismantled. If need be through legal enforcement.

jruohonen 3y ago

A move to criminal law is certainly interesting development in this domain.

gostsamo 3y ago
this was discussed yesterday under a register article. should be noted that this is a private citizen's complaint and not initiated by the state.
MiddleEndian 3y ago
Yeah, not really a fan. Youtube can attempt to ads. I can attempt to block those ads (and have succeeded without interruption so far lol). No need to get the govt involved.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  > No need to get the govt involved. Well, states are already involved in the EU due to the GDPR, e-privacy directive, and other things. But the case is interesting from a legal perspective. Note that the complainant refers to Irish criminal law, but there is also Directive 2013/40/EU, which contains rather similar mandates. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A32013L0040 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    So in terms of pro-privacy, yes, happy for the govt to get involved, possibly even if it's to the point where all internet users end up with the same privacy rights as under-13s. Although even then, have to be vigilant, with the EU and the US periodically trying to mandate "backdoors" into encrypted communications. My concern for govt choosing what can be displayed in terms of ads is a concern that the govt would then move into choosing what must be displayed, once some sort of agreement on what is "fair" to display is reached. I'd prefer the antagonistic free-for-all to continue, as it's pretty easy to block ads everywhere at the moment.
- Teever 3y ago
  Google is a monopolist. Why shouldn't we regulate it differently than we regulate other companies?
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    Because sometimes legislation can end up with regulatory capture. If the govt reaches some sort of agreement with tech companies that results in some things (that we can already block) becoming illegal to display on their end, but other things now becoming illegal to block, that would be a worse result than the govt just doing nothing. Historically, when the govt gets involved, this is the result. Back when cable TV was relevant, Tivo lost a lawsuit filed against them for auto-skipping ads on recorded content. Although looking at the article, it just says "A privacy consultant based in Ireland says he is in the process of filing a criminal complaint against YouTube for alleged unlawful surveillance" so I would be surprised if anything came of this anyway.
    - Teever 3y ago
      Regulatory capture sounds like a criminal activity to me. I'm concerned with the mindet that we shouldn't punish criminal activity because the response from the criminals may be more criminal activity. I think that if we put criminals in jail they will have less opporunity to commit crime, both while they're in jail, and afterwards when they are released and still have a criminal record. Criminals should go to jail for criminal activities is not a controversial opinion.
      - MiddleEndian 3y ago
        Currently they have not broken any laws while detecting ad blockers, besides what some guy declared. And historically, laws in this area have not been favorable to consumers. As far as data protection laws go, those could always be stricter and are a much better area of focus.
- karmasimida 3y ago
  EU is all about over regulation, this is just what they do.
- vasdae 3y ago
  It's the EU, of course they have to get involved. How else are they going to justify the salaries of those unelected officials?

Moldoteck 3y ago

why just yt? There are many more sites doing this

thefounder 3y ago
You have to start somewhere. If you take down something as big as YT the small cockroaches will be gone the next second.
- allan_s 3y ago
  Exactly the prominent "continue without accepting" started to be prominent on banners and not burried below 3 clicks /redirection ONLY AFTER google had to put it on theirs Its the same as when a group bully you, you only need to bring down the big one
jeroenhd 3y ago
It's a giant site that'll be easier to bring to courts, and the EU has made plenty of tech regulation specifically against FAANG+. I don't think Youtube will lose this, but you'll have a lot more luck convincing a judge that Youtube is breaking the law than some blog spam news site.

zazazache 3y ago

While ads suck and I think this is a shitty move by YouTube, I I find it hard to argue against a company that runs on ads not having a legitimate interest in making sure that they are being able to display them on their own website. I think you could even make a good argument that YouTube MUST take appropriate measures to ensure that they display ads that have been paid for. To count impressions so they are able to bill their clients they need to do more or less the same things required to detect ad blocking.

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
If we're going to make law that they must not under-count, lets also make law that they must not over-count. In fact, given that their interest is in higher count, the argument that "they must count correctly to avoid under-counting" doesn't make any sense.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rollcat 3y ago
I have the exact opposite view. We need a law that guarantees end users the right to study and adapt software to fit their personal needs, especially in situations where vendors disregard accessibility (see the June 2023 Reddit API shitstorm and r/blind[1]). Ads are often loud and obnoxious. An ad blocker that turns the volume down (rather than blocking an ad entirely) could be seen as a means of improving accessibility. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_recently_announced_api_changes_and_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/13zr8h2/reddits_rece...
Larrikin 3y ago
If I use Ad Nauseam, Google gets to deliver the ad on their website, the ad buyer gets the click so their marketing department can show how successful their campaign is, and I get to control what is displayed on MY computer with the side benefit of poisoning the data profile that attempts to track me around the entire internet regardless of whether I am paying for an ad free experience or not. Seems like a win for everyone.

QVVRP4nYz 3y ago

It was already covered in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210226 . IMHO this case makes no sense at all.

greybox 3y ago

Whatever I think about Google, I have a softspot for youtube. Youtube is an amazing resource for society, the amount of knowledge that humanity has stored on their servers is mind boggling. You can learn anything there from DIY Flooring installation to programming to Japanese. I've started entire years long side projects based on being inspired by something I've seen on youtube. I'm alright watching adds to see that resource remain free. I'm even alright with them not showing me videos if they detect I have my ad blocker on. That seems fair to me. I use firefox and have ublock origin turned on everywhere else on the web. I do think though that they should be separated from Google.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform. Videos that take a shitton of time and resources to make and are actually useful information-dense content don’t usually get enough viewers to pay for themselves with ads — their audience is way too small by definition — but some stupid low-effort viral shit that gets viewed by billions does.
- greybox 3y ago
  Yess! I totally agree. My favorite creator has a patreon and I contribute that way. But the platform does have their costs to cover, they contribute to discoverability & host all the videos. But yes, creating good quality videos is a full time job that isn't compensated simply by relying on ad money.
- izacus 3y ago
  > Seek ways to support the creators, not the platform. And where exactly will these creators publish their content if not on a platform? YouTube solves their techology problem, delivery problem, storage problem, costs problem for all the previous things and gets them access to advertisers that pay for their content and handles payments across the world for them. (Patreon is a platform too, which also works on handling a subset of those problems). I don't see those creators rushing to cover 6-7 figure AWS bandwidth, transcoding and software development costs themselves for their self hosted videos. They seem to be happy double dipping into YT ad paid service costs and adding sponsorships and patreons on top of that. I haven't seen a single one move to their own AWS hosted machines and paying 5-7 figures in badwidth and CPU costs to get their content delivered to people who want everything for free.

Ajay-p 3y ago

I continue to block ads on YouTube and have had no adverse warnings but I anticipate them eventually. Relevancy of the ads is an issue but I am more frustrated by the quality, repetitiveness, and many times the obnoxiousness of the ads. I will never, ever, purchase liberty insurance. I am sick and tired of the ostrich man. A company that blasts its obnoxious advertising holds the same place in my hatred as loud, used car dealers.

tinrab 3y ago
I keep getting a crypto trading bot ad with AI generated Elon Musk. Ad blockers are necessary.
tmtvl 3y ago
I only got 1 really obnoxious ad about finding out how much my car is worth (I don't own a car, I don't even have a license), but I can usually get rid of it by rerolling by reloading the page.

westurner 3y ago

Why do you pretend that you are entitled to free video storage and bandwidth from YouTube? You haven't been sleighted. That service costs money to provide. No, you don't have a right to free service either. Do you pay your other bills while you demand free rendered services from these companies? Having a disability or similar does not entitle you to an unsubsidized Times Square with no ads. (NASA is running their own streaming network and competing; it can be done. EU should try to run competing free video streaming businesses before shoving preferred American companies around with anti-competitive claims. EU haven't run a video hosting business that's been prevented from competing by the success, existence, and approved mergers and acquisitions of American media companies; and so EU video hosting businesses haven't and can't have been anti-conpetitively disadvantaged.) I also run ad blockers for various justifiable reasons; but I don't tell myself that I have a right to free shtuff. How the heck can you require only Netflix to host 30% local EU content and also demand free video streaming service with no ads?

mchicken 3y ago
I won't mind to watch some ADs from time to time. However, these guys have gotten too greedy with their advertisements and "buy premium" shit popping up every now and then. Heck, my experience without a blocker was that I had 2 freaking 15-second inserts every 5 minutes of video.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  It also changes the nature of the content. I was watching some sports videos this week and all the advertisements were for gambling websites. Meant I was no longer comfortable watching the content around children.
- westurner 3y ago
  I think a lot of that is the (musical) artists/businesspeople demanding a higher - most reasonable - cut, so we all get more ads. Just think how expensive YouTube would be if artists started demanding royalties for works that match their video fingerprints (in addition to the payouts according to audio fingerprints that YouTube pioneered). Encoding, moderation, storage, and bandwidth cost money. I'm sure the YouTube financials and margin are posted. A video streaming service can afford to operate without ads only if: _____. You understand this if you've ever tried to host (multiply-reencoded) video on a shared hosting service with a bandwidth quota for $10-$20 a month. https://WebMonetization.org/ https://WebMonetization.org/ is one proposed solution to advertising-supported media.

ESMirro 3y ago

This is a publicity stunt. He’s simply gone to the Garda (Irish police) and reported a “crime” (that Google have apparently broken the law). The Garda will “investigate”, inevitably find that, no, the law designed to arrest blackhats breaking into computer systems does not cover this scenario despite its vague wording, and inform the complainant accordingly. A small waste of police time and taxpayer money, reported on by trashy clickbait websites as though it’s some meaningful event in order to drive arguments in the comments on the legitimacy of the complaint.

flanbiscuit 3y ago

Related anecdote: Just a couple days ago I was watching YouTube and the videos kept defaulting to 480p quality and not automatically increasing to a higher one. This was on my home network that is definitely able to handle a higher quality stream. I was able to manually set it to 720p (good enough for watching on my laptop) and it didn't flip back. This happened a few times in a row that I found it odd. I then thought it might be ad blocking related so I disabled uBlock Origin for YouTube and then everything worked fine after that. Coincidence? Maybe, I need to try this a few more times to see.

bitvoid 3y ago
There's an extension called Enhancer for YouTube (and probably others) that allows you to automatically set the quality without needing to do it manually. If your default quality setting is higher than a video offers, it'll choose the highest available. There's also other features like automatically expanding the video, converting Shorts to normal videos, automatically expanding the description, automatically hiding chat for live streams, etc.

endisneigh 3y ago

I doubt this will go anywhere, but it’s certainly a reminder for any in the EU who have lofty software monetization ambitions to take their talents elsewhere.

izacus 3y ago

I love how seriously HN takes a nothingburger about a seriously unfounded complaint from one guy. That didn't even pass a basic legal smell test.

hankman86 3y ago

I would love to see the EU’s Digital Markets Act be applied to YouTube. By all accounts, they are a gatekeeper of the user-generated video streaming market. The DML could enforce some increased level of interoperability. This would not only make youtube-dl legal, but also allow other platforms to sideload videos from YouTube. I would love to see other streaming services offer access to videos on YouTube for cheaper. YouTube‘s premium tier is exorbitantly expensive.

hankman86 3y ago

From an end user‘s personal, YouTube‘s ad block detector is unwanted malware, running on hardware that YouTube does not own. If there is no law against that, then there should be. Let’s face it, the advertising and data harvesting revenue model of the Web has done so much damage, it deserves to be dismantled. If need be through legal enforcement.