Tracking code and ad-block blocking breaks Euro computer law, privacy advocate claims
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I agree entirely. And if it’s not a legally enshrined right that people are allowed to run their own scripts in their own browsers on their own computers, it should be.
There might be a big distinction between the right to fight it, versus the rights to not be presented with it to begin with. From a previous article from October
But I’m not sure how much traction this particular argument will get, because it seems to boil down to YouTube simply not requesting consent to run its anti-adblock scripts. Google’s policies are extremely murky, and they are more or less universal: if you want to use YouTube, you consent to the same universal privacy policy that governs if you use Gboard. As far as I can tell, doesn’t this just mean that Google could say “you also consent to us using anti-adblock technology” somewhere, and keep operating the exact same way they have been?
After all, I’m sure their overpaid lawyers could argue this was simply an oversight because they haven’t ever used anti-adblock tech before.
And even if Google fails at that, I’ve got the feeling they will pay a microscopically small fine, throw in a consent dialogue full of flowery language, and effectively create the same blockade to YouTube content. They might even make it a dark pattern, so that they will roll out the anti-adblock tech a month or two after you consent to them using it.
I understand that pages use ads to finance themselves, but this is one thing and quite another to abuse ads, as YT does, in addition from unverified origins, to destroy videos and concerts with 3-4 ads in the middle and even with advertorials of up to 10 minutes, annoying with popups to use premium, having thumbnails with clickbaits that also require an extension to avoid them and also for this shit of interrupting playlists after a certain time, yes or yes, this serves no one, not even the user and nor from the authors of the videos. All of this practically forces the user to put in place countermeasures to block all this shit, or to use some frontend or similar, if they want to see something from their subscriptions properly.
It is not because YT needs money, on the contrary, in recent years it has had more income than ever in its history, it is simply abusing its position in the market, practically as a monopoly and the greed of the shareholders. No other thing. Before it was not so pronounced and you could even use YT without an adblocker, having a banner in the header of the page or an ad at the beginning of a few videos or a promotional video in the list of recommendations, but this has changed drastically.
In any case, I think that if this continues, they are going to shoot themselves in the knee (Cobra effect), getting more and more users to use countermeasures and content creators moving to other platforms (like on Twitter with Musk going overboard)
Vivaldi Ad- and Trackerblocker statistics from last week of Octubre, showing ads and trackers blocked since then.