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.
I cannot stress enough how important it is for you all to take the 5-10 minutes it takes to file this complaint.
If the Irish DPC receives only my complaint they will likely not pay it any attention for at least 18 months if at all - but if they receive 10 000 complaints it will seriously eat into their budget (it costs money to handle complaints) and will "motivate" them to act much faster.
If they receive 100 000 complaints - YouTube will be forced to stop this very quickly indeed.
In other news, I'm currently recovering from this mild heart attack of suddenly experiencing ads on YouTube for the first time in probably 10+ years. 😵
@DigitalStefan You do you, but I'm sure as hell not stuffing a single dime down Google's throat. I'd rather support creators directly, i.e. via Ko-Fi, LibrePay, etc.
Lot's of people asking me why I filed a complaint against #YouTube for their illegal deployment of #spyware to detect #adblockers instead of simply paying for YouTube Premium.
The answer is simple - YouTube Premium has no ads but Google still use it to profile you for advertising on their other products.
I refuse to pay for any service which doesn't respect my fundamental rights.
And so should everyone else, because until they do, Alphabet will continue with their illegal #surveillance.
A wave of new users is coming to #MakerTube because of #youtube began rolling out ad-block blocker everywhere. That is lovely, a warm welcome!
This also means a lot more resources are needed to handle the load. People are importing their whole youtube catalog and I needed to bring up a serious amount of resources which cost time and money.
@MakerTube would you guys repeatedly falsely flag someone for streaming children without adult supervision when they don’t have children anywhere near them?
Last month, YouTube extended its ad blocker detection to users in the European union.
But privacy campaigners say that the adblock detection techniques used by YouTube (and almost everyone else) could be illegal under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive.
For WIRED, I looked at at the legal and technical arguments and spoke to privacy advocate Alexander Hanff (@thatprivacyguy) and MEP Patrick Breyer (@echo_pbreyer) about their work in this area.
With #YouTube getting more aggressive it seems like a good time to point out #PeerTube is probably our best bet in democratizing video on the open web.
Look at the cool stuff that @tilvids is doing by building a community with PeerTube.
@schizanon@art@tilvids I would love to also post my stuff to a Youtube alternative that is more open. I've exhausted my searches though. Closest I've found is Tilvids, but they are more niche. One of my channels is educational tech how to content, but not exactly "edutainment".
So for me it has been and endless search for something somewhat credible, not crazy one sided political, and does my content fit.
I‘m going to mirror my #YouTube uploads to #PeerTube in the future. Videos should automatically appear shortly after they appear on my YT channel (but obviously without any random YouTube ads). Found a cozy place at https://makertube.net/video-channels/janbeta@MakerTube for now and it seems to work seamlessly. Embrace the Fediverse, people! 😘
#Youtube just killed the video on Cory Doctorow’s Hackaday keynote address on #Enshittification because I was watching it in DuckDuckGo, and directed me to watch on Youtube while signed into Google. I was right in the middle of the “Google is an acquirer, not an innovator” part! The IRONY! @pluralistic
@goulien@pluralistic I should explain. By not letting me watch in an alternative browser product and forcing me to watch in their platform, Google is proving Doctorow’s point, while I am actually watching him make the point. Google acquired Youtube, which makes it doubly ironic that they shut down the video I was watching in exactly that part of his lecture.
@andrew@pluralistic@lisamelton locking in all value for themselves and their shareholders is the only way in which #BigTech is endlessly, ubiquitously, smotheringly innovative, all over the whole internet. You will GET in their silos and you will WATCH their ads. You will NOT LEAVE. They will SEE every tap and click and scroll of your activity and DATAMINE it to death. You will NOT access from elsewhere. #enshittification
Ok, I admit it. By now I'm SO tired of youtube I'm actually considering what the alternatives are. How does the whole fedi-videothingy work? Explain it to me like I'm a noob.*
Peertube (https://joinpeertube.org) is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter/other centralized microblogging.
It is also decentralized with ActivityPub, that means you can follow Peertube accounts on Mastodon, but the experience is not the best, since mastodon is not made for video: If you want a Subscriptions Video Feed like on Youtube you'll want a Peertube account on some Peertube instance.
Like on mastodon you can follow any pertube account from any instance from any other instance.
To find content on Peertube you are interested in you can use this official search engine: https://sepiasearch.org/
A good first step is choosing a peertube instance: https://joinpeertube.org/instances . Or you can just use the search engine and start by watching videos without an account.
💁♀️💁♀️#grab✋ your💿💿💿drives and request💅your #data babes👄👄✨ because it's #2023🎉💯💯 and we're getting off every fucking platform apparently📉📉💥🏃💁♀️ #youtube??😂😝🫡 More Like #You Snooze🛌🎳💤🙈 #twitter???👨🏻💎🚗🔥More Like SHITTER :nonazis: 💩💩🚽👎🪠 #Reddit🤔??#more Like Dead-It ⚰️💀💀🛐 #Windows???🪟🖥️more like WIN-BLOWS🐡💥🤯 :1000: :1up: it's time to download your #shit ⬇️⬇️💅💾at all costs🏴☠️🤪 :1000: and say #Fuck You :0w0: 🖕🖕💯 to the 🧍♂️🚫#Tech Bros🚀💥🎊so clone those repos :xenia_laptop: :sayori_like: 💯💯 :1000: and #grease up your router👉👉🧴🙌🥵💦⚠️ because it's a Tech #Fuckfest😳😳😳😳and the 🛟⛑️⛑️safety word is 🚨Fuck This🚨🔥🤪 :1000: :1000: :1000: 🤸
This is the latest #youtube "innovation". #Google with a market cap of $1.7 trillion and $120 billion cash on hand, "needs" to charge for ads on YouTube.
This is, of course, not true. They have more than enough revenue to run YouTube without ads in perpetuity, but they want to please shareholders. The #Peertube community is showing how you can distribute the costs of hosting content as well. If you don't support Google's continued monetization of monopolized video...vote with your feet.
Auch deswegen nutze ich YouTube nicht direkt, sondern Links über @invidious* oder nutze es mobil via @newpipe*, um Videos zu sehen und so weit frei vom Tracking zu sein. Leider sind noch nicht sehr viele anregende Videoproduktionen im Fediverse zB auf @peertube vertreten.
🧵 …wenn ihr zB #YouTube wegen den oben erwähnten Gründen nicht nutzen wollt, dann empfehle ich das @peertube im Fediverse.
Da es sich auf mehreren Servern aufhält, ist die Suche damit übergreifend auf mehrere Anbietern. Dies nach gewünschten #Video's über die unten aufgeführte #Suchmaschine geht praktisch & simpel.
Letzter Zeit bin ich oft auf dem #PeerTube und habe dort Abos, die ich hier im #Fediverse mir ansehe oder das oben erwähnte App.
@scy Have not seen it yet. I already liked the last sentence in the previous video. "People will hate pilons". Yes, I hate pilons now. It was the last weekly video with Tom Scott on a topic😅
It seems (to be confirmed) that #Google asserts this delay wasn't implemented to penalize directly #Firefox users or people that use different browsers from #Chrome. Instead, it was specifically targeted at #adblockers.
I believe you are correct about not having the ability to log in. #NewPipe makes a great viewer, but not great for engagement, following channels, etc.
First, the technique used by these researchers to find out the actual number of videos hosted on #YouTube is definitely unorthodox (and inefficient), but it worked. Since Google won’t provide these numbers, and relying on traditional crawling techniques is likely to bring to the surface only videos that enough people have already interacted with, researchers have run an algorithm on a bunch of supercomupters that simply brute forced all the possible combinations of YouTube ID strings, and kept track of the requests that didn’t end up with a 404.
Second, even a conservative estimate of the number of videos on the platform is massive. 14 billion. Or nearly two videos for each human alive. With an unfathomably long tail.
To dig more in detail, videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94% of the site’s traffic overall, but less than 4% of total uploads - a quite extreme version of the 80-20 rule. About 5% of videos have no views at all, almost 75% have no comments, and even more have no likes.
This sheds an interesting light on what YouTube actually is. Not a product that should be monetized at all costs, but a collective memory of basically all the media content that the human race has created in the past two decades. It’s vital infrastructure that should require no entry barriers, and it should be treated as such.
Most of the minutes of videos stored on YouTube’s servers aren’t from MrBeast, Veritasium or Tom Scott. They are from church services, weddings, condo-board meetings, graduation ceremonies, school lectures, and all other things that humans record and want to save on a permanent storage - for themselves, their families, their co-workers, their friends or their classmates. With absolutely no intention of monetization, wider reach, or whatever stinky corporate metrics YouTube PMs are obsessed with.
When you store most of the media content that our whole species created in the past two decades, you have a strong duty of making it accessible to everyone, all the time, with the smallest amount of friction and UX disruption. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Google has been doing lately.
I don’t see a use-case where we should keep publishing to YouTube, unless you are a professional creator with some actual following there. It should never be used for storing things to be shared only with a small circle, and even less as a permanent storage of your memories. Google can’t be trusted, and yet we’ve donated them all of our creations of the past 20 years, thinking that they’ll take care of them forever - remember the “unlimited storage, forever” promise made by GMail back in the day?
@fabio
I don't disagree. Maybe a role for public libraries here And I wonder what the practical alternatives are. I can imagine governments at any level maintaining their own digital media archives, but I think they'll likely store only what's legally required (text of meeting minutes f. Ex.). Most community orgs and families lack the means and/or skill. Local newspapers did some of this decades ago. But in fact most past analog material is gone too. @smallcircles
First, the job of the Internet Archive is enormous and incredibly understated. Not only it barely receives any funding from governments (those who fund the preservation of physical books and cultural heritage should also fund the preservation of digital media, but that's not happening), but their activities are increasingly seen by Google and friends under a hostile lens.
Countless hostile actions are taken almost on a weekly basis against youtube-dl, yt-dlp, and other tools whose job is simply to download a media file from a URL. Instead of being properly funded, archivists have to constantly operate on the edge of illegality and fears that the tools that they use to scrape the Web are just one DMCA takeover or API change away from being pointless.
Not only there are no financial incentives to ensure that the job of archiving the Web can proceed unimpeded, but the laws of online content are also extremely skewed towards the platforms (and, in part, a tiny minority of high-profile creators) rather than the users - and even less towards our sons and grandsons who may be around when Google and its servers may no longer be around.
Second, if you already know that publishing your content to some closed platforms comes with many risks when it comes to accessibility, preservation and trustworthiness of the platform itself, then we shouldn't upload content to that platform in the first place. The "I can't migrate" excuse only really applies to those who already have tons of followers on their YouTube channel - and, as underlined by this study, that may be <1% than the total number of people who uploaded at least a video to YouTube. Even without running our own servers, we can just leverage services like PeerTube that rely on open protocols and decentralized architectures to distribute the media.
The Fediverse must never, under no circumstances whatsoever, have to firmly rely on something centralised. Ever.
What the Fediverse "needs" is better permission control for its users over who can send them what. Hubzilla has it. (streams) has even more of it. The reason why neither of the two felt the spam wave is not because they're so small. But Mastodon in particular is too much geared towards people who don't want to use anything that's more complicated than Twitter.
AI does not need to be centralized anymore than Mastodon, Misskey, or Sharkey is centralized.
The Fediverse does need an AI to face the ever growing problems it will face.
Script kiddies and hackers are not the real threats of the future. The real threats will be corporations and governments that do not like a social media platform they cannot control and cannot shut down, that anyone can host and join.
A dynamic solution for dynamic problems or it will meet a dynamic end.
Bon Twitter c’est de la merde, mais la vraie question c’est : comment on call out des YouTubeurs de manière décentralisée ? 🤡 je vous laisse brainstormer, c’est pour une amie
@Modiie sinon y'a le post medium, mais il faut que les gens aillent lire aussi, le lien peut tourner pas mal mais y'aura pas le traffic natif d'un journal pour "aider"
🤯 #YouTube approved dozens of election disinformation ads ahead of the #India general election.
"We submitted 48 ads [...containing] content prohibited by YouTube’s #elections#misinformation policies, including false information around the election" like "changes to the voting age, instructions to vote by text message, and incitement to prevent certain groups from voting."
#YouTube has blocked at least three videos that show viewers how to evade military service after it received a request from the Russian authorities, the investigative news outlet Agentstvo reported Monday.
Removing content related to human rights at the request of the Russian government and not because it violates Google’s content policies marks a “new trend,” Agentstvo said, citing an unnamed cybersecurity expert.
