Adtech and transparency: an area of focus for regulators

Posted: 06/06/2019

The scale and sophistication of online targeted advertising has increased dramatically in recent years. While consumers are now used to seeing highly personalised, real-time advertisements, it is less clear whether they have a genuine grasp of the volume of their data being processed to enable these interactions, the number of businesses in the supply chain with which their data is shared or the type of profiling that might be being applied to them. Adtech businesses still have work to do to build consumer understanding of and trust in their sector, with some recent high profile complaints and investigations highlighting the costs to business of getting things wrong in this area.

Regulators across the EU are taking an increased interest in the data processing practices of the adtech industry, with a particular focus on promoting transparency to consumers. In recent months this has included action by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the French data protection regulator (CNIL) and Poland’s Personal Data Protection Office (UODO), as well as the European Commission.

Joanne Vengadesan and Michael Ridge consider a few of these developments and their implications in this article which was first published in the Privacy & Data Protection Journal, Volume 17, Issue 6 (June 2019). Please click here to read full article.

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