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.
@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😅