It just came in asking me to agree to their new terms.
I’m more concerned with the “We can terminate your contract if we detect you use Adblockers”
Clear violation of EU Privacy laws because such detection falls outside lawful collection of data IE, detecting if you have an adblocker or not.
This is pretty standard, it’s to stop you using a VPN to change locations. They have certain licensing agreements in different countries so if they knowingly allowed you to get around them they’d be breaking their licenses. With this clause (whether or not they actually enforce it) they can say that they don’t allow you to do it.
The verbiage at the end of the VPN part seems to indicate they are more concerned about violating GDPR or something similar because people in the EU are spoofing their location to look like they are in the US, etc.
Unlike the account sharing provision, it doesn’t make mention about them cancelling your account for VPN usage. They just say it isn’t permitted.
What’s weird is I use a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel to provide IPv6 access to my home. It’s free and super fast. While Netflix used to constantly flat out block it, I never had any other issues. All of a sudden last week, both Disney+ and one other service started thinking I was in Germany. Even on my AppleTVs, it would give me a brief popup saying I was traveling, and then I had access to STAR content. To be clear, this isn’t a VPN, it’s simply a tunnel that terminates a few hundred miles away in my state.
I ended up disabling it because the show I wanted to see wasn’t on the German Disney+ feed, but there was a LOT of content we don’t get in the US.
While it now explicitly mentions VPN, language regarding not using means to conceal or alter your location has always been in there.
I primarily use Disney Plus on my Fire TV Stick 4K. But if I were to use it on a browser, I’ll use all the uBlock Origin, ad blocking, pop-up blocking, java minimizing add-ons I want. I’ll manually dropper pick and block any webpage element I want. Which is not uncommon for web browser users now. I doubt they’re gonna terminate accounts en masse because of that.
As for VPN’s, those are a common internet tool now. Streaming services should accomodate by having accounts stick to the region of the owner. They sign up with an American credit card, obvious what region that person is in. If that viewer uses a VPN that loops the connection through Japan, account is still American. Cool deal, Disney? Just do that. VPN’s are practical like underwear, not mischief pirating programs like Napster was.
People need to stop panicking, they will not be cancelling any accounts…
The VPN mentioning concerns me. I’m in Vietnam, where Disney+ is not yet available (and I don’t think it will be any time soon), so VPN is the only way to access to Disney+. So bad that it happens :(((((((
It would be an absolutely mad business choice if they actually cancelled people’s subscriptions for using adblockers. Why on Earth would they do that? Advertisement revenue is such a miniscule trickle compared to annual subscription fees. The wording is there because they want to scare people to stop using adblockers. Never in a million years would they start throwing away tens of millions of paying customers for that reason.
EU Law prevents them collecting data stored on your device without consent such as if you have an adblocker installed or active.
But I do not think Disney would need to do this. They just need to determine that ads are not playing on your device. I’m not an expert on the technical aspects of a streaming service but it seems like it would be simple for them to establish this from how the device interacts with their service. Just the time it takes you to watch a program would probably be enough.
Even if this is not possible, Disney saying they may terminate your account if you use an adblocker would not itself violate EU law. EU Law would just prevent them collecting the data to confirm you are using one.
It would be no different to removing copy protection from streams. Disney have no way to know if you do this but they are still going to say they may terminate your account if you do.
This is the way it is worded in the subscriber agreement:
1.2.(b). Restrictions on your use of the Content. You agree that you may not and you agree not to:
xi block or disable any adverts or promotional messaging shown in the Disney+ Service; or
1.5.(a). You agree that Disney+ may, in its sole discretion and without advance notice or liability to you, insofar as possible under local laws, restrict, suspend, or terminate your access to part or all of the Disney+ Service and to any Content if Disney+ believes you are using or have used the Disney+ Service in material violation of these Disney+ Terms of Use or applicable law or regulations or in any manner other than for their intended purpose and in accordance with all other guidelines and requirements applicable thereto.
Note this is the GB version of the agreement. For some reason Disney makes it difficult to access the agreement for other countries. If someone has access to the EU version and it is significantly different please post it below.
Edit. I originally included the wrong part of the agreement that lets them terminate your account if you violate the agreement.
What about the reverse though? Using a VPN to pretend you are at home.
Frankly, I do not know why people in Europe use a VPN for Disney+, because you get a lot more content when you live in Europe - we also have a Star subscription, including a lot more content for grown ups. It’s like Hulu inside Disney+.
Like I get it for other streaming services but Europe has almost everything, because Disney owns its content.
I use a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel to provide IPv6 access to my home. It’s free and super fast
ELI5 the benefits of this please.
I can provide you with a dutch/french version.
“- We hebben een bepaling toegevoegd die aangeeft dat je geen advertenties mag blokkeren en dat we je abonnement onder meer kunnen opschorten of beëindigen als we vaststellen dat je dit doet.”
Yeah, I didn’t spend too long on the EU version since I didn’t want to get my account flagged and getting into that version was completely accidental. It was causing issues with another streaming service too, so I just shut it down for now. But just looking around briefly, I saw a TON of content they have that we don’t, though I assume most of it would be on Hulu (for an added cost of course).
Ironically, the show I was trying to watch, which was NOT available on the EU side, was one of the really old Disney ones – that 70s TV show about the Mouseketeers going to Disney World back around when it first opened. My wife and I were trying to see the part when they were in Fort Wilderness by the lake. It seemed very weird how it would only be available in the US since it was purely a Disney production. The only thing I can think of is that they included the original 1970s commercials, which alone was pretty cool to watch, and maybe there was some rights issue with that – even though most of those companies were likely out of business.
The key benefit is basically just providing IPv6 connectivity to your home/office/network/etc. In my experience, while many mobile carriers do heavily use IPv6 for mobile device connectivity, most ISPs, at least in the US, still only just provide IPv4. Off the top of my head, Comcast is the only ISP I can think of that actually does provide native IPv6 to its customers.
If you are asking what does IPv6 mean, it’s basically the “next generation” version of the Internet. IPv4 is the standard system we have now, using IP addresses like 192.168.100.123 (private IP example). Those are 32 bit addresses which means we have ~4 billion of them. Since the planet has well over that many people and most people have a ton of devices, we’ve exhausted that IP space years ago. The only reason why it hasn’t hit a critical point is because of NAT (Network Address Translation), which allows people to use 1 public IP and share it out amongst hundreds of internal devices. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is also used by some ISPs who are short on public IP addresses. IPv6 on the other hand uses 128-bit addresses, which is basically enough to give an IPv6 address to every atom on the planet or something like that – point being, we would never practically run out for a lonnnng time. While IPv4 addresses are simple (a.b.c.d), IPv6 addresses are longer and more complicated (e.g. 2001:0:9d38:6ab8:1c39:31ac:a118:b1d3). Most devices around support IPv6, and often will use it internally on your home/office network in some way, but unless you have IPv6 internet connectivity, it’s kind of useless.
Hurricane Electric has been a big proponent of getting people moved over to IPv6 for a long time. Part of that effort has been running a service called TunnelBroker. It’s 100% free and allows people to get /48 or /64 IPv6 block allocations to their own networks. Even just one of those /64s would give you more IPv6 addresses for personal use than we have on the Internet times 10^32 – in other words, a lot. It does require some technical knowledge know-how, as you need to basically have a router that supports doing tunneling AND being able to hand out IPv6 addresses internally and route them. But they have how-to guides for many popular devices. And this isn’t some low-grade pathetic offering that most ‘free’ services usually provide. In my testing, my IPv6 connectivity is just as fast as my native IPv4, albeit with a small latency hop with that IPv6 traffic being routed a few hundred miles away. They have POPs throughout the world, so it isn’t just a US thing either.
Now, as to what IPv6 benefits are, that’s kind of a gray area. For most people, even if you have IPv6 support, you don’t even know you are using it. You would still be going to www.google.com in a web browser, the only difference is instead of that becoming an A.B.C.D address, it would be an A:B:C:D:E:F:G:H IPv6 address. Eventually we will reach a point where IPv4 is simply no longer sustainable and we will be forced to move to IPv6 (or the next version), so for now it’s a bit more of a tech hobbyist thing, but there are some benefits with IPv6 beyond just more address space built into it, compared to IPv4.
Once you get it setup, it “just works” and works great, giving you the best of both worlds. Most major websites and Internet services have IPv4 and IPv6 support, so I’ve found that I normally see around a 50/50 split between what I use.
The problem with streaming services, like what I mentioned above, isn’t due to IPv6 inherently, it’s due to the fact that instead of using some directly assigned space by my ISP, I’m using a tunneling service. While I happen to be in the US using a US exit point, people could theoretically do the same thing to appear as if they were in the US, or somewhere else, when they aren’t, akin to a VPN. While it is very similar to a VPN in scope, it isn’t really and isn’t for that purpose. But many streaming services either block TunnelBroker IPv6 addresses, to prevent geo spoofing, or it can also cause issues if the geo-ip location data isn’t being reflected accurately, which is what happened to me with Disney+. There are ways to block certain types of traffic from going over an IPv6 tunnel, which is what I did to get Netflix working by forcing it over IPv4, but as most streaming services use a ton of dynamic CDN servers, it isn’t a perfect science and a bit of a game of wack-a-mole, because they don’t like them being used.
Hope that helps 
Thanks. From the way they are wording things it seems like they will just need a suspicion you doing something wrong.
(google translation)
We added a provision stating that you may not block ads and that we may, among other things, suspend or terminate your subscription if we determine that you are doing so.