A privacy advocate files a complaint against Alphabet, parent company of YouTube. According to him, banning ad blockers on the platform is against GDPR.
Has YouTube stumbled upon a bone? While the platform has gone to war against ad blockers to encourage subscription to YouTube PremiumA privacy advocate counterattack and file a complaint. Remember that the ban on anti-advertising programs on YouTube has recently been introduced in France. If you use AdBlock, uBlock Origin or something similar, you may see a popup appear asking you to deactivate it otherwise you will no longer able to watch videos.
Alexander Hanff believes that the practice is contrary to the GDPR in force in Europe. To find out if you have an ad blocker, YouTube uses a script Who asks your web browser. But he does it without asking for your consent. It is this precise point which according to Hanff does not respect article 5 of the European regulation. Indeed, it stipulates that if data is collected without user consentthey cannot be used for anything.
Banning ad blockers on YouTube would be illegal, complaint filed
Already in 2016, Alexander Hanff asked the European Commission whether deploying a script to detect an ad blocker would require prior consent, to which the institution answered yes. This week, after filed a complaint against YouTube near Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), he explains that the latter “does not disagree with [son] analysis”. The DPC has since contacted Alphabetparent company of YouTube.
A legal battle appears to be looming on the horizon. Although it will not have an immediate effect, it could well lead to a situation where the European user would have the choice to refuse YouTube knowing if he uses an ad blocker. Suffice it to say that this would make the service’s anti-blocking system completely useless. In addition to the establishment of such consent, Hanff also expects the platform to “lift the ban on all accounts that have been banned following detection [d’un bloqueur] and erases all personal data collected illegally […] since the deployment of the script”. The fight is likely to be long.
Source: The Register