Summary of Cologne Court hearing from this week
Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2015 10:41 am
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the hearing at the Cologne Court this week where Springer are suing Eyeo (the company behind AdBlock Plus) in an attempt to either ban the plugin entirely or have the Acceptable Ads programme banned. I have written about the hearing here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/another- ... wser-hanff
As a privacy guy I am very supportive of privacy enhancing technologies such as AdBlock Plus and have discussed the legal side of adblocking at length with the European Commission, European Data Protection Supervisor, various Data Protection Authorities, member of the Article 29 Working Party and several MEPS - all of them agree with me 100% that adblocking plugins facilitate the recommendations of Recital 66 of the ePrivacy Directive which states that citizens can express their choices (consent or deny) through the use of browser controls and as such adblocking plugins have an incredibly important role in the privacy ecosystem.
This is my first post on this board although I have been following it for many years. I am happy to discuss these issues and related issues surrounding the Acceptable Ads programme with anyone who is interested. It is an area of significant research for me currently and has been for the past 8 months - I am currently working on a research paper looking at the legality of anti-adblocking tools under European law which will be published in the fall and I would be happy to receive feedback or comments from this community which might add to the quality of the paper.
Finally, I look forward to spending more time on this forum getting to know people.
As a privacy guy I am very supportive of privacy enhancing technologies such as AdBlock Plus and have discussed the legal side of adblocking at length with the European Commission, European Data Protection Supervisor, various Data Protection Authorities, member of the Article 29 Working Party and several MEPS - all of them agree with me 100% that adblocking plugins facilitate the recommendations of Recital 66 of the ePrivacy Directive which states that citizens can express their choices (consent or deny) through the use of browser controls and as such adblocking plugins have an incredibly important role in the privacy ecosystem.
This is my first post on this board although I have been following it for many years. I am happy to discuss these issues and related issues surrounding the Acceptable Ads programme with anyone who is interested. It is an area of significant research for me currently and has been for the past 8 months - I am currently working on a research paper looking at the legality of anti-adblocking tools under European law which will be published in the fall and I would be happy to receive feedback or comments from this community which might add to the quality of the paper.
Finally, I look forward to spending more time on this forum getting to know people.