YouTube’s crackdown against ad blockers is illegal according to EU law, says Privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff while taking the matter to the European Commission.
YouTube has started implementing ad block detection in Europe since the beginning of this year, and it has been restricting access to its content for certain European users who use ad blockers. According to the EU’s ePrivacy Directive, online service providers must obtain clear consent to access information on a user’s device.
An expert advisor to the European Data Protection Board, Hanff, claims that YouTube’s method of detecting ad blockers through JavaScript scripts that search for specific HTML elements on a webpage should adhere to this directive, and he suggests that YouTube is not complying with this regulation.
Haniff is urging Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) to take action against YouTube in his complaint “for this breach of the law and demand YouTube cease their unlawful deployment of adblocker detection tools.”
Hanff, involved in the upcoming revision of the EU’s ePrivacy regulations, expresses his belief that YouTube’s JavaScript compromises the privacy of EU citizens. He says that the script YouTube is running to detect ad blockers is reading what software people are running on their browsers and is also looking into the browser’s behavior in relation to their private activities.
We have a fundamental right to privacy under Article 7 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. We have a fundamental right to data protection under Article 8.
There are various iterations of YouTube’s ad blocker detection which employ a JavaScript program operating within the user’s browser. However, YouTube claims that it has the capability to deploy unobtrusive server-side techniques to determine whether an advertisement delivered to a user has gone unwatched.
