Seems obvious to me. I suspected that it is criminal behaviour right from start when I heard about it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Privacy consultant Alexander Hanff, who has occasionally contributed to The Register, has challenged Meta’s collection of data without explicit consent under Ireland’s computer abuse law.

“I have notified Pearse Street Garda that I want to give a statement to them for the purpose of the criminal complaint and will be sending them additional information over the weekend,” Hanff told us last night.

Two weeks ago, Hanff filed a civil complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission against YouTube’s browser interrogation system, which detects ad blocking software and refuses to play videos unless adverts are allowed or subscription money handed over.

“Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd for a period of not less than five years from May 25, 2018 to present, illegally deployed surveillance technology to my computers for the purpose of monitoring my behavior, as they had no reasonable excuse or lawful authority to do so,” Hanff alleged to The Register.

“Regulators have let us down and are absolutely (in my opinion) partly responsible for the erosion of our fundamental rights and the expansion of these illegal behaviors, by failing to do their jobs and take strong enforcement action against violators,” he claimed.

“As a result, it is now considered as the normal way to conduct online business, which is an incredibly bad reflection of the regulators and has significantly eroded trust of the public that their complaints will ever be dealt with at all – let alone in a meaningful way.”

The original article contains 1,288 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

You could probably go with the shotgun method going after the big tech companies and come back with a handful of actionable violations. Their all skirting the laws and thinking they can get away with it.

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