In January 2023, the European Commission (EC) published its Study on the impact of recent developments in digital advertising on privacy, publishers and advertisers.
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Firstly, the study showed that:
- the way in which digital advertising is bought and sold can be extremely complex;
- the most widely used products in digital advertising rely on large amounts of personal data and profiling of individuals;
- the large amount of data processing required to support the most widely used digital advertising methods leads to high energy consumption and emissions;
- individuals do not have adequate control over the collection and use of their personal data for digital advertising;
- there is limited evidence to suggest that the efficiency and efficacy gains of ad products relying on personal data and profiling outweigh the interference with individuals’ fundamental rights, consumer rights in addition to the reported negative societal impacts;
- publishers in the EU struggle to compete for digital advertising revenue as large platforms have more access to data than they do. That has created an unsustainable situation for advertisers and publishers;
- lack of transparency in digital advertising limits evidence-based decision-making;
- the rapid change and complex nature of personal data processing in the digital ad ecosystem can present barriers to effective enforcement;
Therefore, it is necessary to improve transparency, accountability, to increase individuals’ control over the use and collection of personal data for the digital ad purposes. In addition, the study also found several obstacles making it harder for advertisers and publishers to “know their audience”.
Second, obstacle preventing the consumers from control ad target
Although there exists a few industry tools claiming to enable individuals to review and control the use of consumers’ data, most of them are not user-friendly, deploy a multitude of design features and language choices that undermine the ability of users to exercise control over their own data. In addition, the consumers must indicate their preferences across all of these tools separately to enable them to influence the ad targets toward themselves across all the devices, apps and sites they use.
Finally, the study also pointed to gaps in enforcing regulations which could enable many issues addressed before.
Finally, gaps in current regulatory framework
The study also pointed to gaps in regulations which could enable many issues addressed before, for example:
- we still have to wait for the harmonised definition of “direct marketing”, which ePrivacy Regulation shall provide;
- transparency decree of ad preference tools has not been clear and sufficient to the extent of article 21.2 GDPR;
- we are looking forward to having the Digital Market Act (“DMA”) as “a potential positive step” […] to “solve the problem of limitations of lengthy interventions in competition enforcement once the contravention has already taken place”;
- the current legislation has not addressed the issue of digital advertising emissions;
- according Meta, sin the DMA does not uniformly apply to companies which are not gatekeepers, there would be gaps in the EU regulatory framework;
- the profiling ad may still be targeted to minors or based on special category data on the sites or apps which are not within the extent of “online platform” under article 3(i) Digital Service Act (DSA).
Related news about the privacy enforcement of advertisers and impact of Apple’s change of privacy policy.
Google’s update about their privacy policy
https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/how-we-achieve-privacy-through-innovation/
Apple’s privacy policy change
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213603
Impact of Apple’s change of privacy policy
Full text of the study: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/C4E1FAQHryPgNYpcTGg/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/0/1675172398319?e=1675900800&v=beta&t=OQkSSQaRlAtBvj1rY7u8e1rU0c0aQnXm60RofLusuk8
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