A letter from the President of the European Commission may spark an ongoing war between privacy advocates and online publishers that use anti-ad-blocking filters on their sites.
Alexander Hanff, CEO of Think Privacy Inc., has penned a letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, EC's president, this past winter, asking for clarification regarding the language of the e-Privacy Directive's Cookie Law.
Mr. Hanff wanted to know if the cookie law is referring strictly to browser cookies or the general notion of gathering "any information stored on such equipment [is] part of the privacy sphere of the users requiring protection."
Scanning for ad-blockers breaks the EU's e-Privacy Directive
The response of the European Commission was clear, and that any type of server or client-side scripts that attempt to access or collect information stored on the user's devices fall under the e-Privacy's umbrella, meaning that publishers need to ask for permission before gathering any type of data, not just about cookies.
