Today I filed a formal complaint against #YouTube with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner for their illegal deployment of #adblock detection technologies.
Under Article 5(3) of 2002/58/EC YouTube are legally obligated to obtain consent before storing or accessing information already stored on an end user's terminal equipment unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.
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.
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 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.