 According to every Reddit comment online, it seems like the latest YouTube ad blocker detection is illegal in Europe and everybody is laughing at the company for trying to make money in a way that might end up costing them through, you know, economic sanctions. However, I'm always skeptical of such claims, especially because everybody hates advertisement or paying money. So we are instinctively biased towards thinking that anything a company does to make us pay more is just has to be a bad move. But is it though? So there are two main claims. The first one is about privacy. If we consider using an ad blocker as personal information, then the detection of ad blockers is gaining private information about the user. This is the main claim I'm going to explore in this video. A more recent one, however, shows that YouTube is apparently more on this later slowing down the website for Firefox users up to five seconds. That would be illegal in the European Union and elsewhere, but it's actually completely false. So let's start with the former and a bit of context. This story has a protagonist. This man is Alexander, Alexander Henf, which is totally not pronounced like that. But let's go with it, AKA the privacy guy. He's the host of that privacy show and could reassuringly expensive consultant is in the European data protection board. He served as an advisor on the European Union on privacy legislation and he consulted for the FTC, the European Commission and the UK Home Office and more is not some random guy. He has worked on privacy for more than 20 years. So great. Then there's a directive from 2002. That's a lot of time ago. It's called the e privacy directive. And it regulates how information that travels through public communication networks can be used such as, you know, internet. This is extremely broad and the relevant article is 5.3, which was amended in 2009 and says roughly storing information or gaining access to information already stored in the device of a user is only allowed if the user has given consent of or if it's strictly necessary to establish the electronic communication or to provide the service. So according to Hanf, ad blocker detection mechanisms are in direct violation of this article. This is very similar to cookies, which are storage of information and you have to consent to them. By the same logic, Hanf claims that the storage of scripts that checks whether you have an ad blocker is also storage of information. You might argue that it's not personal information. It's not user data. But the article doesn't say that it just says information. So Hanf actually wrote a letter in 2016 to the president of the European Commission asking to clarify the scope of this article to check whether it was correct. He did receive an official reply stating that yes, article 5.3 would also apply to the storage by websites of scripts in the user terminal equipment to detect if the user have installed or are using ad blockers. Although this is extremely important, keep in mind that this is merely, we could say, the interpretation of the directive by the European Commission, which is the legislative body and doesn't actually have a say on how laws are interpreted. That's up to the judiciary bodies. As far as I know, we don't have any explicit sentence from any of them, but I do have this juicy quote by the Court of Justice of the European Union. That protection of personal data applies to any information stored in such terminal equipment, regardless of whether or not it is personal data. Before I go on, though, this video is not sponsored by anyone and a lot of you use ad blockers, fair enough, but that means that I don't get that much out of YouTube either. And yet, these videos took hours of research and writing and recording and editing, blah, blah, blah. So multiple people worked on this video and all of this can only be done thanks to the donations of all of you. I have a monthly goal of 1000 euros to keep all of this running, and I've got people, LibrePay, Ko-Fi, Patreon, everything you could think of. If you could chip in something, that'd be lovely, but no pressure. Anyway, it is now essential to know that all this refers to what you can do without explicit consent. If you get the user to agree on any agree button, well, similarly to cookies, you can just do ad blocker detection. If Google added an hey, we are going to look for ad blockers in their service agreement, then all users who use YouTube after either doing a login or having clicked on agree to their services would not be covered by this law. However, you are able to watch YouTube videos even if you're not just logged in or even if you don't click on any agree button. If YouTube also does ad blocking tracking over there, then yeah, that's directly against the privacy directive. However, there is still a bit of complexity. Many articles about all this also quote a 2017 European Union memo that says, the proposal allows websites providers to check if the end user's device is able to receive their content, including advertisement, without obtaining the end user's consent. In reading this quote in various news articles, such as The Verge, I was shocked in how many of them just said that this somehow meant that a European Commission said something that contradicts the 2016 letter. Are we just ignoring the beginning of this quote? The proposal allows websites, blah, blah, blah, which proposals to what accepted when again context matters. In 2017, the European Commission put forward a proposal for a new high privacy regulation to replace the old privacy directive. The difference between a directive and a regulation is that directives just set out goals to achieve and then each member state decides how to implement those directives. Whereas regulations have binding legal force throughout every member state. The memo that was quoted earlier talks about this new regulation, which however is still in the legislative process and is currently blocked because, quote from Hanf, the council are seeking to weaken existing laws and the parliament is refusing to allow it and good and they both have to agree to allow to pass it. So how do we get from it seems like YouTube is violating the privacy directive to let's, I don't know, fine YouTube? Well, it's not that simple, especially considering that again, directives are not regulation. How Hanf decided to proceed is to issue a complaint towards YouTube to the High Rich Data Protection Commission. They are the independent authority in Ireland responsible for upholding your individual's right to data privacy and quote, they have acknowledged the complaint and they reached out to YouTube for further information. Hanf hopes that if the High Rich DPC agrees with him, they will issue an enforcement notice to seize these activities without consent, which could either mean that they stop doing this whole ad blocking tracker thing that's unlikely, or they might just, you know, ask for consent and then just do this on everybody that clicks on agree in the annoying pop up. And given that we all do that anyway without reading the terms and conditions, yeah, yeah. Now again, there is some extra complexity. Firstly, let me point out how none of this is specifically about YouTube. There are thousands of different websites who do ad blocking detection and I'm sure you've been through lots of them. YouTube is just a big juicy target for a complaint. Secondly, all of this relies on the core issue of storing JavaScript code that checks for ad blockers. This is client side tracking. That is, it checks for ad blocking directly on your device. If this tracking is done server side, such as by noticing that you're not not downloading the advertisement from the servers, if this tracking is done server side, such as by noticing that you're not downloading the advertisement from their servers, then the privacy directive probably doesn't apply at all. Maybe it's the server refusing the service, which they can do. Of course, doing a server side detection is hard because ad blockers scripts run on your device, not on YouTube's servers. Still, YouTube currently claims that they're curring out ad blocker detection within YouTube and not on users devices. However, that quote doesn't line up with wired observation of those of the ad blocker developers as a JavaScript detection routing on a website has to be run by the browser to function end quote. Finally, and I swear, this is the very last paragraph paragraph I write about this. I kind of simplify this whole storing a JavaScript is against the directive thing. So let me clarify that again, according to a hand consent is required to store information and to gain access to stored information. If I send you a JavaScript piece of code, that piece of code is technically information. It's not personal information or personal data, but nonetheless, it's information. So that requires consent. Then that piece of code checks for ad blockers, which is gaining access to already stored information. This operation also requires consent, and it has to be separate consent. This is because all of this is not strictly necessary for YouTube to offer the service. And also claims that their server side detection also requires consent because they would have to process information originated from the user device. Of course, all of these claims have to be checked by the Irish authority. And I'm personally slightly skeptical on some of this, but I'm not expert. So I'll just shut up. Finally, let me say a couple of words on the topic of YouTube slowing down intentionally on browsers that aren't Chrome. First of all, this was actually debated by Firefox themselves, like Mozilla said that there's no evidence of this happening targeting Firefox in particular. But anyway, this whole section will be much shorter as we currently lack a lot of the required context to fully understand what's going on. I will suggest as a great video to check out Brody's ones, which is that one. So just check it out. But if you want the gist of it, the claim is pretty simple. YouTube waits five seconds before loading on browsers that aren't Chrome. Many users were able to replicate the issue. But also they were able to replicate it on Chrome, which this isn't a bug on Firefox side. Again, it also happens on Chrome. And there is actually a piece of JavaScript code that says, Hey, wait for five seconds and then load the website. This doesn't mean however that the website can't be loaded before that five seconds. That piece of code might be seen as a worst case scenario. First, wait for some criteria before loading the website. And if it still hasn't loaded after five seconds, just go for it. According to random Reddit users for the best source of information we can have right now, it seems like YouTube loads an advertisement for the video and then says load the website either when the advertisement is done or when five seconds has passed. Thus again, this seems to be some sort of ad blocking workaround thing. Although it's less clear to me why this would only happen in Firefox. Again, it doesn't. Sorry, the script is old. It doesn't. It also happens in Chrome. YouTube did address this whole thing. And they simply said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You shouldn't be using an ad blocker or you should be paying for YouTube premium blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's not an explanation, but it does seem like this five seconds load and has to do with an ad blocker being installed. Again, lots of context missing. So I'll just