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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of free courses (or parts thereof) would vanish. (A key resource for poorer learners)
Most modern tech repair guides would be gone (no machine breakdowns, no guides on fixing errors on old hardware)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 why Google is pushing hard their Web Environment Integrity. It’s DRM for the browser! They want the TPM chip in your computer to attest that the code running processing the video stream is authentic. Then you can’t slice out the ads because you do not have physical access to the inside of TPM. With HDCP encryption on the HDMI video output, you gonna need to point a literal video camera at the physical screen to DVR the video and slice out the ads later.
They’ve been working hard for decades to lock down the video pipeline with TPM and HDCP and now WEI. They said “don’t worry about it” and we let them. They are really close to snapping the trap shut!
Now please excuse me, my tongue is falling off with all the acronyms…
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
A lot of free courses (or parts thereof) would vanish. (A key resource for poorer learners)
Most modern tech repair guides would be gone (no machine breakdowns, no guides on fixing errors on old hardware)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
We could build a public database (like SponsorBlock) of known ad video slices and detect them that way.
There will always be a way to detect and block ads.
I’m not worried.
That’s why Google is pushing hard their Web Environment Integrity. It’s DRM for the browser! They want the TPM chip in your computer to attest that the code running processing the video stream is authentic. Then you can’t slice out the ads because you do not have physical access to the inside of TPM. With HDCP encryption on the HDMI video output, you gonna need to point a literal video camera at the physical screen to DVR the video and slice out the ads later.
They’ve been working hard for decades to lock down the video pipeline with TPM and HDCP and now WEI. They said “don’t worry about it” and we let them. They are really close to snapping the trap shut!
Now please excuse me, my tongue is falling off with all the acronyms…
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
The ad company is Google, no? So they already have that logic ready to go.
Does anybody actually click the ads in YT videos? The only clickable thing I ever see is “Skip Ad”.
Clicks are a metric that Google/YouTube tracks to determine whether a business has to pay for that ad, so it’s necessary for ads to be clickable.
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.
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?
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
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.
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:
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.
They could easily put a “consent” requirement to access
And in the war you probably also sided with the Nazis because ‘well they invaded already, might as well give up’