That is a well-spoken and sympathetic plaintiff.<p>But the HN title is really misleading. This is only about a private criminal action by a private citizen. The bar for filing a "complaint" like this appears to be pretty low, akin to a civil lawsuit. HN's current title sounds like Irish prosecuting agencies are investigating FAANG's for crimes committed, but that is not the case!
Google game plan:<p>1. Push people to stop using ad blockers via client side tech so they can harvest and profile our data.<p>2. Push out a browser with a trusted computing model around it that prevents ad blockers from being used and allows tracking to take place.<p>My game plan:<p>1. Steal the content with yt-dlp and NewPipe and give them the middle finger.
I like the idea and agree with the arguments to some extent. Improving performance of ads by collecting information on how one uses a service - sure.
Monitoring one's every move, click and activity across 3rd party websites... then combining and selling the entire "persona" - no, no, no.<p>It also feels like we've reached the end of the rope when it comes to targeted ads, it was fun, but we need an alternative that doesn't depend on people being transformed into a "behavioural commodity".<p>And also YouTube running fancy scripts to detect ads loading - my browser, my choice!
I'd be curious what kind of precedent a ruling against anti-adblockers would set for anti-cheating or anti-tampering software that are commonly present in games, and sometimes involve invasive kernel-level drivers for the sole purpose of monitoring what's running on a user's device. These are significantly more invasive and reveal far more private information about someone compared to just a simple check for whether or not an adblock extension is active