Re: Not this guy again
"(Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and many more) have been trying to change that since 2009 and have failed consistently -"
They have not, because there's no need to change the laws for ad blocker detection to be legal. That's why Google is using it on YouTube, you know, simply because it's legal and does not violate any EU laws. Actually, it's used by many other companies and publishers in the EU, especially in Germany where it is now quite common for all websites to greet you with a popup on which you either have give consent to showing ads or subscribe to a website. And that practice has been actually confirmed to be completely legal - meaning also in agreement with EU law - by German authorities and courts.
"And no, under current EU law a web site does not have a right to know you have blocked ads "
Wrong. EU laws say nothing about that.
" this is explicit in the ePrivacy Directive "
Wrong. It does not mention blocking ads anywhere, and detection of ad blocking does not depend on anything you claim would violate EU laws.
"in relation to serverside processing of traffic data - for example to detect if your IP requested a specific ad or not"
Wrong. For one, because you don't need an IP address to detect ad blocking. And also because knowing your IP address is necessary to service you anyway, so, you can't even make the argument that it's not. Also, your IP address can and will be stored by virtually all servers anyway because of security purposes, which they have all right to under EU law.
" perhaps use some of it to educate yourself on EU law..."
Yeah, perhaps educate yourself about not only EU law, but about technicalities of ad blocking detection, because you still seem to knwo nothing about it, and didn't learn anything in all these years. You still invoke the completely wrong paragraphs, because you assume for ex. that ad blocking detection needs client side storing of data, or collection of data for which consent is needed for - none of which is actually true.
That's why ad blocking detectors are still legal and always will be. And you know, the worst about your argument and crusade is, that even if it would not be legal to detect ad blocking, and even if you would somehow succeed with it (which you didn't in the last decade and doesn't look like you could in the following decade), all you could ever achieve is, I mean if you could somehow outlaw ad blocker detection, is that since they couldn't make money through ads anymore, Google and all the websites on the web would put all their content and services behind paywalls, and you could only access them after you paid for them.
Which is not only stupid because it's obviously nothing most of us (and probably not even you) would want to, ie. if we'd have to pay $5-10 for every single website we use and visit, every month, so we can access them, but also because in order to pay with a credit card or other means you'd have to give up even more personal (and more personally identifying info) than what any adblock detector technology would possibly collect.
So, your crusade is essentially a self-defeating one, which does not serve not only the interest of publishers, but not that of the users/visitors either. If you don't see that, it's bad, and if you see that and still do what you that, well, that's even worse.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
