- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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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.
I paid for paid for premium for a while. Then it showed me an ad for paramount + anyways. So I said fuck you google and installed an ad blocker.
Point being I was willing and did pay for the premium service. But even “ad free with premium” still wasn’t ad free. It was “ad reduced”
I’ve had Premium since whenever it was first introduced (a decade at this point?) and I’ve never seen a youtube-provided ad during that time, assuming I’m logged into the appropriate account.
I had it for a long time too and never did until maybe… idk 2 months ago? And they only show up on specific videos that have shows/movies associated with it.
So in this case, I was watching game grumps play peppa pig (would recommend lol) and it showed me this right under the vid.
Huh. 98% of my youtube consumption is on either TV or phone apps at this point, though, so they really wouldn’t have a place to put something like that. Or maybe they would and I just haven’t watched anything that would have it. Who knows.
Paramount Plus definitely likes shoving a 30 second ad before your show even on the ad-free plan, though…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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).
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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Honestly if I were a politician I would support legislation restricting permanent bans from major websites from being given out willy-nilly because too many of them are ubiquitous enough to qualify as a public good.
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.
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.
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???
I feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you’ll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won’t be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
the reason they are not doing it is because the ads are personalized. So if they want to bake an ad onto a video they will end up with countless videos each on with their own unique ads which is not viable logistically. So they can only do it on-the-fly. But re-encoding each video on-the-fly for each user is also a nightmare logistically, if not impossible at all.
I don’t think you’d need to re-encode the whole thing on the fly. More frigging the container data around, than the video/audio codec itself.
That way I could request some_pointless_video.mp4 and it sends me 95% the same thing as is already on their server, with adverts jammed into it at defined intervals.
They probably think they can win for now by messing with individual ad-blockers, but with 3rd party players becoming more popular, I can see that being a catch-all solution.
isn’t this more or less what they’re doing now? The difference is that the ads are coming from different server and have an overlay on top with a timer and a skip. As long as the ads are coming from a different server they will be detectable. Also as long as the ads have overlays they are also detectable. They would need to make the ads be served from the same server that serves the video and eliminate the overlays.
That’s the difference. The ads are coming from somewhere else and displayed in a different way.
By injecting it into the stream, there’s no way to detect that. To your player it would all look like it’s coming from the same place. Instead of a ten minute video and a couple of 20 second ads, it’s now just 11 minutes of video.
yes. But then they have different problems. Now it is the ad company who is responsible to serve the ads and the personalization comes from there. This is achieved by the client directly “asking” the ad company for ads. If they want the ads to come from the same stream this means that the customer identity is passed to youtube, then youtube requests the ads in behalf of the client, and then serves them mixed in the video stream. I’m not a lawyer but I think that this causes different legal problems for youtube on the part that they will need to ask the ads on behalf of someone else.
Also apart from that, technically, the part of the video that is an ad, will be associated with a call-to-action URL and an overlay on top of the video, since they need that by clicking on the video it will go to a the ad’s call-to-action instead of just pausing the video. This will still make them detectable
Don’t they have standardized resolutions and the file broken into hundreds/thousands of parts anyways? Couldn’t they just add in ads to some of those parts in those same resolutions?
e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over_HTTP
Similar to Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP.
Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?
That only works by users crowdsourcing and flagging the advert sections.
By doing it on the fly, each user could get different ads in different places.
You could have an app running in the background that detects ads based on the audio (like Shazam for music) and skips it for you. You could probably analyse all the video slices YT sends you and detect ads that way. I think as long as we are still in control of the playback devices we can find ways to make them skip ads.
There even is a project that uses machine learning to detect sponsor segments. https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
MythTV has a broadcast television ad detection module and it works pretty damn well.
This goes into a bit of detail on it’s methods:
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_detection
A lot of what it does could be applied to a video stream, although adapting it to useful real-time could be tricky.
Sure, you could do that.
You could also download the stream multiple times under different profiles, compare them and then strip away differences.
But we’re quickly exiting “one guy with a bit of Javascript” territory.
We left that territory years ago. There are big community projects and entire companies built on providing adblocking features. People will build it if the need and potential audience is great enough.
If users are crowdsourcing what the embedded ads are, couldn’t this hypothetical situation be solved by a version of sponserblock that just looks at the agreggurate of the non-flagged video runtime, and learns what the content is and then cuts out any aberrations?
They can’t do that because of YouTube premium. They know they’re making a lot of money from people who don’t want to see ads.
the problem is not the premium. The problem is the personalized ads.
I’m not talking about the EU’s issue, I’m talking about why they could never embed their own ads in videos. Because people pay for premium specifically to not see ads and they would have a mass cancellation on their hands.
This is a non issue, on twitch if you sub to a streamer you don’t see ads and they are embed in the stream for non paying users still, and it’s pretty hard to block for free.
This is what I was responding to:
I feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads.
That would be embedding the ads directly in the videos, which I do not think they will do.
yes. This is what I replied at. Having a version with ads and a version without ads is not that big of an issue. The issue becomes huge because the ads are personalized which means that they cannot even have a version with ads since the ads are different for each user.
It’s an issue of storage space if nothing else. It means doubling all of their videos. Why would they do that? As others have pointed out, they have other options when it comes to dealing with adblockers which don’t violate any EU regulations and even this is pretty tenuous. So they don’t need to do that. They can just prevent the site from working properly if you have an adblocker.
Then those users would get the ad free stream.
Which users? The ones who pay for Premium? That’s the whole point of Premium.
Yes, those users.
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
It’d be better if we collectively told Google that we won’t watch its videos until it stops blocking adblockers, or stops serving ads completely, and just migrate to FOSS video hosting services or made our own websites again.
And in the war you probably also sided with the Nazis because ‘well they invaded already, might as well give up’
Everyday I think the European Union for preventing the internet from being worse than it could be. It’s sad that back when the internet was a cesspool was so far the best age for it. Normies really do ruin everything
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.
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.
unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
YouTube could quite easily argue that ads fund their service and therefore an adblock detector would be necessary.
that’s not how it is to be interpreted.
it means something like in order for google maps to show you your position they NEED to access your device’s gps service, otherwise maps by design can not display your position.Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
This is why I’ve never had an issue blocking ads. Pick a couple creators you like, join their patreon or buy some merch. You owe YT nothing.
This so much! Same argument for piracy tbh.
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Sure, but Google has created a monopoly where no one else can even compete.
If Google wasn’t so shady with their practices including playing extremely fast and loose with our data and trust, I MIGHT have the goodwill to sit through 50% of the commercials they inject suddenly with no respect for the place they’re added in the content. 100% though? I’m honestly shocked anyone can sit through it.
They do evil, or at least won’t not do evil.
And they require us to trust them?
I’d disagree here. To me it seems like YouTube isn’t a monopoly because Google is being monopolistic with it (if you do have any examples of this, please show me) but rather because of the ridiculous scale and expense of such a project. The infrastructure to support something like YouTube at the scale of YouTube is insane, and I doubt many organisations or companies have the ability to even dream of it, not to mention the extreme network effect with something like YouTube. Google doesn’t have to be monopolistic (I’m sure they would be if there were viable competitors, sure, not saying that Google’s a saint) because it’s almost impossible to compete just in sheer complexity and cost.
It’s kind of like how the entire semiconductor industry is dependent on lithography machines from one company: ASML. But that’s not because they’re being anti-competetive, it’s because their products are insanely, extremely complex, precise and advanced. Decades upon decades and billions and billions of RnD.
The big problem with Google is that they are in, or a part of, almost everything on the internet, and it all funnels users back to them one way or another.
Their search favors their own things, so if you search for anything, YouTube will come up most of the time. This by itself is enough to kill competition. Their search also recommends their browser heavily if you’re not using it, which is how they became the most-used browser, which defaults to their search, which by default recommends YouTube in most searches.
Even if you don’t use Chrome, don’t worry because they will pay absolutely nuts money to be the default search on their competitors browsers, which is again more people to YouTube. And if that isn’t enough, most browsers are built on Chromium, which Google maintains, meaning they can sway the course of their competitors browsers over the long term, which they are doing by selectively killing and bringing in certain technologies over years.
Android, which is also Google, I believe has YouTube installed by default, or at least all of my phones have had it. Trying to compete with defaults is almost unachievable. It’s easy to think that people will change settings, but most people don’t.
I agree that the technology and infrastructure needed to run YouTube is huge, and it’s amazing, but that’s only part of the story. Google has so much control of so many things that even if you could build the same thing, that’s only the beginning.
But it’s not only YouTube, it’s the same for Gmail. Gmail has so much market share that they can kill competitors by making another email service seem unreliable. And all of their services point back to Gmail.
It’s not just that they have a monopoly on video, they have a monopoly on the whole internet.
Don’t put all the financial costs on one single company. Spread the financial costs out among lots of people and run small peertube servers. If a creator becomes popular, then the people watching their videos at the same time will be sharing the video with anybody else who loads it afterwards and take load off the server so it does not crash.
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What do you mean? Google has a bunch of competitors.
You can start uploading your videos somewhere else right now. You won’t, because everyone is on YouTube.
That’s called the network effect, and we’re to blame for maintaining it.
Back when it was unintrusive banner ads and the like? Sure, you might have had a point then. But now, with multiple unskippable 2 minute ads, before, during, and after the video? Fuck no.
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The thing is, YouTube has no value to me. The only reason I use it is because of the creators on there. They make the content and they deserve my money but if I could, I would use a different platform. YouTube has created a Monopoly, which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho.
The reason I don’t like YouTube is because they remove features everyone wanted to keep, then add stuff nobody ever wanted. They demonetize creators for no reason all the time and a lot of the rules they have for staying monetized are stupid and actively make the content worse, like not being allowed to swear. The DMCA takedown system is also extremely flawed, you can literally file a takedown for any video and they’ll instantly remove it and give the creators channel a strike without checking anything about the takedown request. This has led to channels being removed (3 strikes and your channel gets removed), eventhough they didn’t even do anything wrong. And even if the DMCA takedown is actually justified, you get a strike even when the video is years old, which is stupid because you can’t remember every single video, so you shouldn’t get a strike if it’s that old already. Communication with YouTube, when they’ve once again made a mistake, is also very difficult because the only way to reach them is though Twitter and also only if your tweet gets popular enough that they actually see it or care about it.
AdBlockers are the only way to vote with your wallet. A service with this many huge flaws is nothing I want to support or even use.
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Strictly speaking, isn’t that exactly how the DMCA is designed to work? Aren’t they technically violating it anytime they actually review something manually and decide to ignore a DMCA notice? I don’t think how Google responds to DMCA notices has really been tested with respect to keeping their safe harbor protections.
Removing content that didn’t violate the DMCA is not how it should work and older content should obviously still be removed but you don’t have to get a strike for that
which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho
The creators are free to upload content anywhere they want without restrictions. It’s not YouTube’s fault that they don’t.
Uploading content to other websites is just not worth it. You won’t get views anywhere else.
When you say YouTube crested a monopoly, what do you mean? There are tons of video hosting and streaming websites. Basically all social media platforms have video now, as well.
I mean that I can’t really use other video platforms because the content I want is on YouTube. If you upload videos you also kind of have to use YouTube because otherwise almost no one is going to see your videos and you also can’t really make money with it.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but its really not my problem and I don’t feel obliged to help them make money.
Its not my problem if their service is costly and not profitable. They don’t have to do it. I have no moral obligation to them being profitable.
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do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses
I’m probably showing my age, but there was a time in human history, where people created things not because it was or could be a profitable business, but because they were inspired to share their vision, or humor, or art with the world. In the years before 2008, and in this mythical time on the internet, we did and were and created simply “for the lulz”. If anything, I think that focusing on the idea that your job on the internet is to “generate content” is a toxic leak from neoliberalism/ VC culture. Its the commoditization of the self.
No one joined SA’s or Farks photoshop contests because it made them money. We did it because it allowed us to be funny, to one another, for one another. We pitched in together to cover the server costs and that was that. In fact, that’s how Reddit stayed alive. We pitched in together to cover server costs so that we could do things for ourselves (memes, nudes, music, whatever…). I learned to code making crappy flash games for new grounds not because it was profitable, but because it was fun, and cool to be a part of a community who loved to make thing and then give them away.
The enshitification of all things is a symptom of a broader issue, which is the commoditization of the process of self actualization, which happens through lived experience. The human desire to build, to create, to make art, to talk, chat and communicate; its part of a process where we find out who we are.
There are plenty of things in life that are worth doing that aren’t profitable. The ideal that we should allow a neo-liberal doctrine to determine how we find out about ourselves via our creative expression, for me, is worth resisting.
It’s Google. They can afford it.
Just replying to confirm that “strictly necessary” has never meant, “makes us money.” It means technically necessary.
Adblock detection has literally already been ruled on though (it needs consent). I’m sure there are nuances above my understanding, but it’s not that simple.
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Blargerer is probably saying that because the Mastodon post OP linked to says “In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.”
That, in turn, is probably referring to a letter received from the European Commission by the same person, which you can see here: https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/722861362607747072
It’s not exactly a “ruling”, but it’s still pretty convincing.
You consent to their terms of service and privacy policy when you access their website by your continued use. They disclose the collection of browser behavior and more in the privacy policy. I suspect they are covered here but I don’t specialize in EU policy.
Their terms of service have to be compliant with local laws though. You can’t just put whatever you want in there and expect it to stand up in court.
This is true. And I’ll disclaim again that I’m not an expert on EU law or policy. But I’m not familiar with a US policy or law that would preclude that consent to collection from being a condition of use. I’ve written these policies for organizations, and I think it will be a difficult argument to make. I’d love to read an analysis by a lawyer or policy writer who specializes in the EU.
Not an expert either, but from what I’ve seen, the EU actually has some amount of consumer protection. The USA on the other hand mostly lets big corporations get away with whatever they want, as long as they make some “donations”.
I haven’t agreed to any new terms and the adblocker appears for me
Assuming it didn’t exist for months or years before this. As far as I know, blocking ads has always been against ToS.
This sign can’t stop me because I can’t read!
Also required should be YouTube accepting liability for damage done by malicious ads or hacks injecting malware onto user systems via ad infrastructure.
Why wouldn’t the hacker just be liable instead?
Because Google is the one trying to force consumers to raw dog the internet.
Their precedent is that they sold our data for 20 years before this and are now the biggest company in the world, so they can go pound sand.
In the interest of making criticisms factually correct, they don’t “sell” user data, they make money through targeted advertising using user data. They actually benefit by being the only ones with your data, it’s not in their interest to sell it.
That’s a very good point. I’m not very aware of EU regulations, I wonder if there has been established precedent in court
Call me naive, but doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law, whether I deem it necessary or not. I would have to receive a legal exception to the rule, as it were. As it stands, it’s illegal.
doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law
yeah, doing something illegal is illegal, hard to argue with that tautology.
but you seem to be living under the impression that immoral = illegal, which is not the case.
I think what they were saying is that the law specifically makes exceptions for things that are necessary. Others are saying ads are not necessary per the law’s definition, but that’s a separate issue.
Saving Jews during the holocaust in Germany was illegal. How naive are you?
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!
I am not paying for Premium again until they bring the dislike button back.
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.
As an English person I thought yay that means us. Then I remembered. . .
Not that the social media corps have ever given a shit.
