Europe is continuing its fight against mechanised political influence, propaganda, disinformation. Package restricting the use of targeted political ads is the new chapter. In this note, I critically analyse the proposals. This analysis will also help to understand what might lie ahead for non-political ads in the future. It’s Read More
Technology platforms create technologies with significant impacts on nations, governments, and societies. This impact is increasing, reaching new heights. Many feel that the rules of the game are unclear, insufficient, or non-existent. Without rules, one only wonders who would set out the road to the future. In other words, does Read More
European Commission announced the “Democratic Action Plan”. It is a rather general strategic document. What stands out is the realization that New Digital Technologies have great impacts on democratic societies. Both positive (i.e. like the ability to reach new groups of people) and negative (like the non-transparent campaigning, disinformation, Read More
European Parliament recently called on a ban on micro-targeted ads. Such a decision made by a democratically elected body is somewhat unprecedented. Micro-targeting allows people (i.e. “advertisers”) to use platform profiling to reach the “right” audience. For example targeting content based on traits such as: Male/Female, age, the Read More
Imagine tens of millions of users potentially receiving a popup asking the user to grant permission to be tracked, in September 2020. The striking news emerged from this year’s Apple WWDC conference. Apple will limit the use of the IDFA “tracking identifier”. This identifier allowed advertisers to track the Read More
Real-Time Bidding is a technology enabling the targeting of content to mobile and web users. Real-Time Bidding has numerous problems. * Security, including malvertising (abusing ads infrastructure to deliver malware); affecting hundreds of millions of user visits; delivering malware. * Privacy, as it is a mass market for personal data, with vague Read More
Websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, smartphones and just about any other products, systems or processes will, in a majority of cases, might soon need to redesign and re-engineer how user consent is being processed. Why? Because of the European General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR makes consent a bit closer Read More
Recently I wrote about the new IAB (ad industry) initiative meaning to fight fraud in programmatic advertising. You can find my previous post here. As the ads.txt standard shows which Ads Exchanges are brokering ads space (somewhat related with exchange of user data), I explored the options of using Read More
Web privacy and transparency engineering can work both for businesses and users. Sometimes technologies can effectively open the opportunities for enhancing transparency even without a clear intention of doing so. In this post, I’m analyzing the extension to OpenRTB (Real-Time Bidding specification) which is meant to decrease the rate Read More