Last week, privacy advocate (and very occasional Reg columnist) Alexander Hanff filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) decrying YouTube’s deployment of JavaScript code to detect the use of ad blocking extensions by website visitors.
On October 16, according to the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, Google published a support pagedeclaring that “When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
“If you use ad blockers,” it continues, “we’ll ask you to allow ads on YouTube or sign up for YouTube Premium. If you continue to use ad blockers, we may block your video playback.”