YouTube’s ad blocking crackdown is facing a new challenge: privacy laws | Privacy advocates argue YouTube’s ad blocker restrictions violate the European Union’s online privacy laws.::YouTube is launching a “global effort” to crack down on ad blockers, but some privacy advocates in the European Union argue that it’s illegal.
From the EU, I was one of the ones that reported this.
https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us_en
Perhaps “'privacy laws”.
But I made a point about: monopolistic behavior of Google
And what is funny:
Your FBI recommends the use of adblockers.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-blocker-to-dodge-scammers
So Google are a bunch of scammers?
So Google are a bunch of scammers?
Yeah, their whole business model is a scam. A currently (mostly) legal one, but a scam nonetheless.
I can’t blame them for wanting to restore monetization as adblockers removed most of the revenue from those platforms. But fighting adblockers is not a way to do this. They should either change entire YouTube business model to pay to access, or rework ads to be less annoying. If ads were not annoying as fuck, people wouldn’t be pushed to install adblock in the first place. Adblock became popular when video ads with sound started popping up on the websites. This includes video ads in YouTube videos, people just hate to watch video ads.
For every person using an ad blocker there’s 10,000 that don’t. Going after the fraction of a percent of perceived lost revenue from people who wouldn’t click your ads or buy your products anyway is just the epitome of greed.
Agreed. There is always a subset of customers in which a business loses money. The corporations today have grown soft and cannot stomach a loss. It’s time we stop catering to weak companies and start catering to those who understand the risks associated with owning a business.
Nah, their problem is some analyst, which does not understand what he was speaking of, who decide that the company should grow by x% in the next quarter. If the company grow only by x -1 % then investors sell, the stock lose value, the shareholders are poorer and the big wings of the company may lose their job due to “loss of confidence in the management” from the shareholders.
True, true. Building their own gallows.
Are ads cheaper now? I imagine with combined slots of ads, their duration, size on the screen they aren’t as expensive as they were and letting their clients get more for the same price. Compare one textual block from early android’s free apps to fullscreen video ads being a norm, same with youtube, chains of long videos. It seems they caused the deterioration of their own market. I imagine what actual statistics of clicks-per-show look like if they are so desperate. We sometimes hear of how premium superbowl or olympics ads are, and here it feels the exclusivity of access to consumer isn’t valued. You buy a slot, but your ad is sandwiched between other random products. How is that exclusive? Businesses would get used to it, but their incencitive isn’t there. If they pay big bucks, they want to buy a billboard, not a small string in a tabloid.
As other person have said, users with blocks are a minority. But, what’s important, bashing them is a reputational thing. Google’s advertising and data-farming business. This gesture is good to promote at the board meating, to their regulars, and maybe charge a bit more. Also important that these blockers kill tracking devices like invisible pixels, so it may be a bigger reason to implement that than some loss of ad revenue.
Google is very smart with ad prices because they are actually not constant. Advertisers have bots that bid how much they want to pay for an ad, determining based on user data how much it’s worth for them, and if your bot wins, your ad is shown. That’s why if some advertiser decides to pay a lot to a lot of user groups, the same freaking ads are being shown to you all the time
People getting crazier by the day… someone just told me I am supporting piracy by blocking ads! Like what?
- You’re supporting piracy!
- Thanks for noticing!
I literally have a t-shirt that says “support piracy”.
Wouldn’t Netflix’s password sharing fall under the same law then?
They use user information like connected wifi and position data to determine if a device is used away from the defined “home”.
GDPR doesn’t say you can never use any form of user data. It says a lot about what data is considered personal, what kind of disclosure and consent you need to setup first (mostly terms of service stuff), how you can store that data, how you can use it, and what responsibilities you have to remove or produce a copy of that data on demand. Until you’ve implemented GDPR it can be hard to understand what it is. But it’s not a super bonus +1 magic shield for all information.
No.
Netflix logging your IP is the equivalent of taking a photo of someone in public. Not ideal if you’re into privacy, but it’s a public place, so it’s your problem. YouTube’s Adblock detection is equivalent to patting them down to see if they have a weapon and requiring their ID. The software actively looks for changes, using technology that could detect what extensions you have installed, gather data to profile you better for ads, and monitor what you’re doing in your browser while the tab is open.
Both are ultimately for the same purpose, to prevent people from avoiding to pay them, but methods matter.
Incorrect. https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/ states IP addresses are personal data.
What’s the email of the privacy committee again?
Wow, so basically blacklisting email sender’s on ip address isn’t allowed either? When is an IP address, an individual and when is it just a machine in the cloud?
You can. After all the GDPR does not forbid you to not accept to talk to someone.
I’m not sure that helps much. Blacklisting senders based on their IP is much more commonly (and effectively) done on intermediary servers rather than on the client.
What matters is the association of the IP to a person or account. If you receive spam and block the source IP it’s not personal data. If you create an account on a website and they store your IP to it then it is.
Handling IPs for necessary technical service protection can also be acceptable without explicit consent as long as it’s limited/temporary (you may be able to handle that without account association in the first place anyway).
GDPR does NOT prohibit storing any information indefinitely if it is required for proper functioning of the service. If the service bans you by IP, they need your IP indefinitely to function properly and GDPR doesn’t apply. Just like you can’t remove yourself from a creditor black list, and it will have a lot more personal information than just an IP address.
Looks like a good time to move to the EU… 😬
They’re also leading the race to making encryption illegal, so…
That’s dumb and will never happen
In the US there was a period of time where it was illegal to export encryption above a certain level, so in a way it has already happened. Dumb has never stopped governments before.
Friend of mine back then bought the T-shirt 😁
How would ssl work if you ban encryption?
There was a proposal to have webbrowsers have to accept government certificates. Consequently they could man-in-the-middle/take over domains.
You could argue it’s no different from another central authority that can issue trusted certificates. But it’s government’s rather than independent orgs.
Yeah I hope so it would be so idiotic to try.
I mean… they literally try to fuck up the internet every few years. Eventually they’ll get someth8ng through.
Sounds like a good time to be a VPN provider.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As YouTube tightens its restrictions on ad blockers, privacy advocates in the European Union are betting that government regulations can put a stop to the crackdown.
One privacy expert, Alexander Hanff, filed a complaint in October with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).
Hanff argues that YouTube’s ad blocker detection system is a violation of privacy — a charge Google denies — and illegal under EU law.
The European Commission seemed to reverse its stance in a proposed reform of its privacy law in 2017, stating that website providers should be able to check whether a user is using an ad blocker without their approval.
Patrick Breyer, a German digital rights advocate and member of the European Parliament, writes on Mastodon that “YouTube wants to force us into surveillance advertising and tracking with an anti-adblock wall.” Breyer says he is also asking the European Commission about the legality of ad blocker detection systems under the ePrivacy Directive.
It’s a bit too early to tell how the commission will respond to Hanff’s challenge, but the outcome likely won’t result in any changes to the existing system for those of us in the US.
The original article contains 827 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
sigh
For me, the most important bit was the basis of the claim that YouTube would be breaching privacy, and this is it (completely missing from the “summary”):
“AdBlock detection scripts are spyware — there is no other way to describe them and as such it is not acceptable to deploy them without consent,” Hanff tells The Verge. “I consider any deployment of technology which can be used to spy on my devices is both unethical and illegal in most situations.”
One privacy expert, Alexander Hanff, filed a complaint…
I bet he always locked his bedroom door room as a teenager
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