The European Commission has supported privacy advocate Alexander Hanff’s position that “ad blocker blocker” techniques employed by publications like The New York Times could breach EU privacy law, Financial Times reports. “We live in a regulatory vacuum at the moment,” Hanff said. “There is very little enforcement.” His motion has catalyzed a handful of EU-wide challenges, to be decided in the future by national regulators, the report states. Not everyone agrees with Hanff and the EC. “In a nutshell, I think that . . . [Hanff’s position] is stretching the law,” said Hogan Lovells’ Eduardo Ustaran, CIPP/E. “The aim of those [ad block] detectors is not to gain access to information stored in the device as such, but to identify certain functionality within the device.” (Registration may be required to access this story.)
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