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.
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.
that would be illegal too, because that information is not strictly necessary for their service - they could only opt to not provide the service in the eu
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.
No, because businesses have multiple revenue streams. YouTube has a subscription offering, and a free, advertiser-supported offering. Both are part of their business model.
At the bottom of the uBlock Origin homepage there’s links to the most popular list homepages which would be a good starting point.
The Peter Lowe’s ad tracking list links to its own Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/blocklist (Confirm by clicking on the link at the uBlock Origin homepage, then at the top click on patreon).
The other ones I couldn’t find any obvious way to donate to the list maintainers.
A lot of the cookie notifications can’t collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying “opt-out” workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > ‘Filter lists’ and enable the “EasyList - Cookie Notices” you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they’re following the law, you shouldn’t be tracked.
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.
that would be illegal too, because that information is not strictly necessary for their service - they could only opt to not provide the service in the eu
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.
Couldn’t that claim be countered by pointing out that they already deploy a for pay approach called youtube premium?
No, because businesses have multiple revenue streams. YouTube has a subscription offering, and a free, advertiser-supported offering. Both are part of their business model.
alright
Nothing more fun than having to go through some websites shitty settings to toggle everything off.
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.
ublock does it too if you enable the “block annoyances” option in the settings
I don’t know why I have not yet donated to these developers. They sure as hell deserve it. As soon as I get home they’re gonna get some moneys!
sadly they’re not accepting donations
I bet the list maintainers accept tips!
At the bottom of the uBlock Origin homepage there’s links to the most popular list homepages which would be a good starting point.
The Peter Lowe’s ad tracking list links to its own Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/blocklist (Confirm by clicking on the link at the uBlock Origin homepage, then at the top click on patreon).
The other ones I couldn’t find any obvious way to donate to the list maintainers.
Sadly, no ublock for me on Safari, but good to know!
Don’t use stupid browsers then ;-)
Duckduckgo browser does it too
Still a curveball. Collecting your data and having to say ot to your face are not the same.
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.
which you could get around by using another frontend for youtube or just going with vlc all the way by playing the url in vlc directly.
Firefox’s ‘Play in VLC’ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-in-vlc/ is brilliant for this - it does entire playlists too. It works with smpalyer, which is even better player than VLC, IMO.
https://www.smplayer.info/
A lot of the cookie notifications can’t collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying “opt-out” workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > ‘Filter lists’ and enable the “EasyList - Cookie Notices” you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they’re following the law, you shouldn’t be tracked.