this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he's making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they're doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn't stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he's repeatedly flaunting credentials that don't change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Won't cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Afaik you can't bypass laws and regulations with ToS
Definetly not if you are not registered. And likely if you are not logged in. This is EU, not US.
You can't bypass laws, but the law in question only requires permission of the enduser. Getting this permission in your ToS isn't bypassing anything, it's acting according to the law.
that's not true in the EU.
the reason those cookie banners are everywhere, for example, is because the EU requires explicit consent for a lot of things that used to be covered by ToS.
simply putting clauses into your ToS doesn't shield the company from legal action at all.
regardless of what's written in the ToS, final say over what is and isn't legal lies with local authorities, not YouTube.
Here is a guide from a publisher trade group on the implementation of ad block detectors under gdpr.
It says that listing the use in your ToS is a defensible strategy but could have some risk. If the organization wants to further limit risk, they can add a consent banner, consent wall, or both.
My guess is Google is the risk accepting type on this issue and it's willing to litigate to argue that its ToS is sufficient or the way they implement it differs from cookies. Either way, they could completely make this go away by asking a consent for ad delivery to their cookie notice.
The TOS holds no weight in EU courts.
No matter what some companies want you to believe. That is why they call it a risk.