I’ve had it with YouTube and their attempts to force me into watching adverts. It began a little while ago when YouTube and its Godforsaken apparatchiks presumably decided that they weren’t making enough money. No matter that they capitalise on our choices by bombarding us with advertising every minute they can.
WIRED reported yesterday that “YouTube began rolling out ad block detection to Europe earlier this year and is now preventing some European users from viewing its content if they have an ad blocker enabled.” Well, it’s not just Europe, now. Mexico too. And I’ll be surprised if US users aren’t already being impacted.
The EU's ePrivacy Directive mandates that online service providers must obtain clear permission before accessing information stored on a user's device. Alexander Hanff, an expert advisor to the European Data Protection Board, argues that YouTube's use of JavaScript detection scripts, which search for specific HTML page elements in a user's browser, falls under this requirement. According to him, YouTube is not adhering to this directive.
“The script that [YouTube] deploys is detecting what software people are running on their machines or what behaviour their browser is exhibiting in relation to their private activities. It's not okay. It's illegal,” Hanff claims, echoing his complaint. “We have a fundamental right to privacy under Article 7 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. We have a fundamental right to data protection under Article 8.”
I have all sorts of adblockers available including Malwarebytes browser guard (which YouTube objects to. They want me to remove my malware protection so as to bombard me with ads.) Also Ghostery, UBlock, and Ad Nauseam. (This latter item you can arrange to click on all ads, in the background, thus destroying Google’s data stream and costing all their advertisers.)
However even with ALL the adblockers turned off, YouTube still blocks links. The only way I can watch it now is in an incognito window. And THAT means I’m anonymous, I can’t any longer support content creators. So, if you are a content creator, this new YouTube policy is directly harming you.
So I have decided to stop watching YouTube for now. I really don’t need it. Ukraine war? I can watch Denis’s channel on Telegram. Movies? I can watch BiliBili! (The Chinese version of YouTube).
JOIN ME in a YouTube boycott for a week!