YouTube - Semi-obscene Advertising

[DavR]

Had an interesting call this morning from a teacher who got a very adult advert on in the middle of a fairly innocent YouTube video she was showing her class - a cartoon character simulating masturbation to a pretty girl, I'm told.

 

To date, we've taken the position of leaving YouTube on the loosest filtering setting, for staff use only, on the logic that we trust our staff to vet their content before showing it to a class. Historically we've found the various restricted modes too restrictive. But that's the videos themselves, I don't think we ever considered the ads would become a threat.

 

What have other schools experiences been on this? Have you gone to moderate safe search for staff, or, are we recommending Ad blockers?

 

I use Adblock Plus for personal use, does anyone have a blocker they recommend for general usage?

[jthompson]

There's a recent thread about ad/tracker blocker suggestions, and uBlock Origin would be the goto suggestion.

 

I'm supposing that YouTube ads respond to trackers, etc. on devices as well as to the actual video being watched, so it's probably fairly impossible to vouch for advert content.

[DavR]

There's a recent thread about ad/tracker blocker suggestions, and uBlock Origin would be the goto suggestion.

 

Brill, I'll search for that thread and look into it

I'm supposing that YouTube ads respond to trackers, etc. on devices as well as to the actual video being watched, so it's probably fairly impossible to vouch for advert content.

 

If that was a targeted ad, I dread to think what the rest of the teacher's search history and behaviour is.... I was just surprised that YouTube were allowing semi-obscene content in their ads I guess. I've been using Adblock Plus for so long I have to admit to being pretty naive and inexperienced on that score.

[jthompson]

FYI, this was the thread I was thinking of. It wasn't so much discussion school deployments, though, but uBlock Origin is still a safe enough bet.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/231502-what-ad-blocker-do-you-use.html

[Brax]

if you have smoothwall you can enable a setting to remove youtube ads.

[DavR]

if you have smoothwall you can enable a setting to remove youtube ads.

 

Sadly not. Although that could be a useful method if it could be replicated outside of Smoothwall.

[Dan2025]

Had an interesting call this morning from a teacher who got a very adult advert on in the middle of a fairly innocent YouTube video she was showing her class - a cartoon character simulating masturbation to a pretty girl, I'm told.

 

To date, we've taken the position of leaving YouTube on the loosest filtering setting, for staff use only, on the logic that we trust our staff to vet their content before showing it to a class. Historically we've found the various restricted modes too restrictive. But that's the videos themselves, I don't think we ever considered the ads would become a threat.

 

What have other schools experiences been on this? Have you gone to moderate safe search for staff, or, are we recommending Ad blockers?

 

I use Adblock Plus for personal use, does anyone have a blocker they recommend for general usage?

I think I've seen that AD in question a few times, it's for one of those dreadful mobile games if I recall correctly.

[DavR]

I think I've seen that AD in question a few times, it's for one of those dreadful mobile games if I recall correctly.

 

Not just us, then.

 

I'm no prude, far from it, but that just seems inappropriate for general consumption.