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Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU
(eupolicy.social)
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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The way the guy was flexing about being an "expert", while it may or may not be true (I haven't independently verified his credentials), is extremely offputting. Refusing to engage with hecklers is a better policy than flexing with your education, credentials, and experience.
How is it offputting to say "listen to me because I'm an expert, here's my credentials"? Everybody's so fast to claim "fake news" nowadays that demonstrating your credibility has become a requirement.
The person he was responding to was asking for some specific clarification. Instead of offering it, he appealed to his own authority, essentially listing his credentials in a pompous way and then saying "You don't need to understand. I'm the expert, I'll understand it for you."
He's answering to a person saying "IANAL" asking whether this really is illegal with "I am an expert on this particular law, helped to write its replacement and already had confirmation from DG Just (EU Commission) that the law applies in the way I have stated". Seems perfectly apropos to me.
But he didn't cite policy, law, or legal analysis. I work as a technology policy writer/interpreter in the US so I can't address the EU issues. But I've never responded to someone who asked for the basis of my conclusion by listing my credentials. When I publish a policy position paper, I cite chapter and verse all relevant laws, policies, statutes, and explanation for interpretation. I've written entire pages offering justification for the interpretation of a single sentence a particular way. He didn't do that. He might be right, but he didn't justify it in any meaningful way.
Yikes that reply was way out of proportion to the question, holy moly. Listing off his degrees just dripped with insecurity...
IANAL, but since without adblocker site works, but with adblocker youtube breaks it, which means this information somehow is collected, which probably is violation of EU law no matter how exactly Google gets this information. And Google can't say "we accidentaly are making totally different thing, that just so happens to break adblock" because they just wrote in text that they detected adblock.
Yeah as others have stated, Google could deduce your usage of an adblock through any myriad ways. But you've got a point - it's one to thing to throw a popup saying "Our ads couldn't play for some reason, we won't show you videos until they do," and another to say "We know you are using an adblocker, we won't show you videos until you disable it."
Yep. He took a massive ego trip early on and immediately came across as someone I don’t particularly want to side with.
I’m a web developer and fundamentally disagree with his take on what JavaScript can do on the client side. I see what he’s getting at but I think he’s wrong. JavaScript can certainly detect access to resources (ads in this instance) without violating any enforceable policies. Half the internet does error handling with JS for things that won’t load - how can this be construed as violating eprivacy? Nonsense.
That being said I’d love for this feature to go away and would be happy to see YouTube and Google go pound sand.. but this feels like a stretch. It was inevitable enshittification imo.