this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
2209 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
59436 readers
3000 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
You're missing the point/s
Actually, ALL the data Google has on you is yours. Google do not own the data, neither do reddit, Facebook or anyone else. They merely have a licence.
Personally I think even that is illegal. Contracts require consideration, you exchange x for y, then you have details in the terms and conditions. This is like "come in for free!" and then everything is in the terms and conditions. If you look at insurance, they're required to have a key facts page to bring to the front the main points from the terms in plain English. The cookie splash screen doesn't really do this, as it obfuscates just how much data they collect, and is for the most part unenforceable as you can't see what data they hold. Furthermore, the data they collect isn't proportional to your use of the website.
The whole thing flies in the face of the core principles of contract law under which all trading is done. They tell us our data has no value and it isn't worth the hassle of us getting paid, yet they use that data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. We might not know how to make use of that data, and you'll need a lot of other data to build something to sell, but a manufacturer of nuts and bolts doesn't know how to build a car - yet they still get paid for a portion of the value derived from their product through others' work, as most of the value comes from what you can do with it. We're all being robbed, every single one of us, including politicians and lawmakers.
Very good point.