We are experiencing quite turbulent times with YouTube, especially since they started implementing the measure against ad blockers on their platform a decade ago. Now, Edge users have also begun to encounter issues with Google’s video application.
At the beginning of this year, Google started experimenting with blocking users who used ad blockers. As we saw at the time, if you were using an ad blocker, YouTube could detect it and refuse to show you content until you disabled it.
According to Windows Latest, it seems that this is now happening to some Edge users who have chosen the Strict option with the browser’s tracking prevention feature, which blocks trackers and ensures that ads have a minimum level of customization.
In other words, it restricts the personal data that Google can extract from the browser in order to better serve targeted ads.
This highly restrictive measure is what bothers YouTube, obviously
The technology site observed this behavior and pointed out that if affected, Edge users will have to switch from strict settings to the balanced medium mode for tracking protection.
Google has decided that this specific privacy option in Edge interferes too much with its advertising work on YouTube, so it must be dealt with accordingly. To Google, this is seen as an ad blocker.
Naturally, Google will argue that those who watch YouTube for free have to offer something in the form of monetization for the company, and if they don’t want ads, then they should subscribe to YouTube Premium (which unfortunately saw a price increase not too long ago).
However, it seems quite harsh to start doing this suddenly with Edge because its anti-tracking features don’t go as far as a complete ad blocker.
According to the report, not all Edge users seem to be affected, so it could be that Google is still testing the waters. If that’s the case, perhaps the decision could be reversed later on.
