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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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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."