Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU

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 mean, no matter what, you do have a say. You can just not use YouTube. Pretty easy, actually.

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?

The amount of money they made is entirely meaningless without knowing their spending.

Revenue isn't profit?

that's google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.

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.

did you just tey to pre-emptively suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a google paid shill?

Because if so I would like to know where I can apply for my payment from Google.

I think any reasonable person knows by now that if you don't "pay for a product you sre the product", everyone knows youtube collects data and sells it and your eyes to advertisers that's their business model, guess what those servers youtube runs on? aren't free, as you yourself said, content creators aren't free, the engineers working on YouTube aren't free, so your suggestion is that despite this, youtube should still be free and ad/data collection free.

well do tell me, how long do you think youtube will last with your business model?

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.

But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.

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.

shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

Yay for ublocks annoyance pop up blocker. No more cookie pop ups

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.

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.

Immoral? For making you watch ads? How are ads immoral? You're using the service, you watch ads, it's not rocket surgery

All they need to implement ad block detection is user consent, which they likely cover on their terms of service and privacy policy.

Source

Exactly.

But people are hell bent on "Google doing this, bad".

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.

Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?

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.

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???

Afaik you can't bypass laws and regulations with ToS

The EU has its faults, too, like this BS about sacrificing encryption. Overall, there seem to be a lot of benefits reigning in big companies, though.

Who else is looking out for their citizens? I think some congresspeople in the US ask tough questions, but in the end, business just goes on as usual.

Yes, the same EU. The fact that it's considering some poor choices doesn't detract from the fact that it's actions thus far have been positive and deserve appreciation. Real Life doesn't split people neatly into heroes and villains.

Actually I will, because big Tech used to be on the level because they knew they would be called out for fuckery. Then Facebook brought the Baby Boomers online and it was the Eternal September on steroids.

This is the same chicken / egg thing as plastic pollutions.

Sure consumers choice of whether to discard or recycle a plastic straw is nothing compared to the decisions of corporations, but then consumers invest in those companies, buy their products, and elect representatives who do not hold them accountable.

Big tech has ruined the internet because people were willing to trade their privacy and their attention in order to watch gifs of cats playing the piano. I'm not "blaming" people for that - hell, I was one of them, but you can't solve the problem without understanding how it's perpetuated.

The normies support big tech, they love it. They probably work for big tech, or wish they did, or at least imagine themselves as the next Elon Musk.

Strictly speaking, management at Big Tech are all normies and they make the decisions.

I think the point is solid: non-tech-people sell capabilities to other non-tech-people to make money, and this forms a feedback loop and drives direction. A non-big-tech world is wildly different because it's more like tech people building an environment for doing things with other tech people.

"Don't be an asshole"? As a response to a short three sentence statement where no one was an asshole...

I think you're the fucking asshole regardless of how much blame "big tech" and corporations in general bare here.

Slow the fuck down.

If a private company has to succeed, it has to offer things ** that normies want.** FB/G is shit because this is what normies consume - the ego-display, the dopamine kick. In every enshittification of a service, there is a history of it being cravingly indulged by the mass. Now when the companies started rising up and used their monopoly, they (the normies) are realizing they have been shit-eating for a long time. One may argue the companies were not so in the beginning, but that would be a very myopic view.

Normally it wouldn't be, but these sheep were told "Do not go to this farm or you will be cooked." and responded with "Pffft, that'll happen to the other guy.." or "Pfft you're just whining because you expect everything just handed to you"

But they weren't led. They were convinced by big tech. But in the end they choose to go into the meat grinder themselves.

As much as I loathe that term, it could be argued that they indirectly are.

The massive increase in the amount of people online made it profitable for companies to be online. Lack of regulations and the inability for regulators to keep up with technological advancements allowed companies to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. The complete inability of government to prevent monetary influence on legislature has prevented good regulations from developing. The fact that the average person online uses maybe five websites in total and doesn't engage further means that most issues fly under the radar of the average person, which limits the ability of any significant amount of constituents to pressure the politicians supposedly representing them to do better, and limits the overall impact of any movement away from shitty sites to better ones.

It's a tangled yarn ball, but one that would struggle to exist without a majority of people to pull money from who just do not care about any of the shit that people more deeply invested in the internet care about.

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.

I don’t agree. They can reasonably argue that advertising is a requirement of their business model, so it is necessary to advertise. Therefore it is necessary for them to block access to those blocking advertising. The directive cited isn’t intended to make advertiser supported services effectively illegal in the EU. That would be a massive own goal. It’s intended to make deceptive and unnecessary data collection illegal. Nothing YouTube is doing is deceptive. They’re being very clear about their intention to advertise to non-subscribers.

There are multiple French websites that do this. It is legal (otherwise these websites would not do this anymore, it's been a while).
There is a popup asking you if you consent to get cookies (for advertisement). If you say "no", it leads you to another popup with two choices :

• Change your decision and accept cookies
• Pay for a premium service without advertisements

I can heartily recommend Consent-O-Matic. I'd say that it's able to clear (and reject by default) the cookie warnings on 95% of the sites I visit.

Would be a shame if your answer to that consent question was not saved and would be required to answer each time you open up a video.

All these fuckers are our neighbors and for many of us former employers.

We know exactly how they think, and what they think of us.

Andreesen is the tip of the iceberg.

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.

Just replying to confirm that "strictly necessary" has never meant, "makes us money." It means technically necessary.

Do you have a link to the EU requiring consent to detect ad blocking?

Most of what I can find is from the late 2010s but specifically says that consent is not required for adblock detection. https://adguard.com/en/blog/eu-defines-its-stance-on-ad-blockers.html

https://iabeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20160516-IABEU_Guidance_AdBlockerDetection.pdf

But also: I assume consent can be obtained with a mandatory TOS update.

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.

Why wouldn't the hacker just be liable instead?

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.

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?

Oh it did.

The cookie banner law should have specified the exact text that had to be displayed and it should have been really scary.

Really interested in your thought process here

Eh, no, it's the exact opposite of that.

Huh? This is about youtube wanting to make sure you see ads, and people complaining to the EU to make them censure youtube for it. Not sure where you got that EU wants to make sure you see ads.

Too many big companies got their feefees hurtied because we downthumbered their stupid announcements. Think of them for once 😭

UP RYD!

you can compare the version numbers and if they're off, ubo will eventually update it.

Except that EU court rulings don't count in countries that stupidly left, no matter when they happened.

You could pass a similar law yourself, but that's probably not going to happen with either the abysmal Tories or the feckless centrist party Keir "I want to be Tony Blair" Starmer has turned Labour into in charge 😮‍💨

Permanently Deleted

When it’s a percent of the revenue, it’s just the cost of doing business.

Thanks for highlighting this, I might have missed it otherwise.

I didn't know either, but I figured any option is better, the filings are read by humans after all. Still, as another poster pointed out, the agency is already investigating.

Good to know, actually