consumer privacy

There are certain privacy-related phrases companies use when they’re talking about their products that should make your antennae twitch. If you hear them, it’s a signal to ask questions.

Apple has a knack for making privacy-related product announcements that cast aspersions on the data practices of any company whose name isn’t “Apple,” and there were a handful of those.

Raashee Gupta Erry spent most of her career in the digital marketing industry at agencies and brands, including Essence and Volkswagen US. Then she took a job explaining ad tech to the Federal Trade Commission. “There’s a wind of change happening,” Gupta Erry says.

Most consumers think the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a lot broader than it is. But in a post-Dobbs world, it bears repeating: HIPAA doesn’t cover all health data, including reproductive health information collected through phones, tablets and other devices.

There’s no such thing as “compliance by obscurity,” says Sheila Colclasure, who serves as global chief digital responsibility and public policy officer at Kinesso, the mar tech unit within IPG.

Digital advertising’s biggest trade organization, the IAB, took a shot at Apple on Monday. Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework undermines advertising, according to the IAB, even as Apple builds its own ad business. “Apple is fine with advertising, as long as they get to control it on their terms,” IAB CEO David Cohen told hundreds of industry […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The “notice and choice” model makes sense in theory, but in practice? It’s a mess. Privacy platitudes need to stop, says Jessica Lee, a partner at Loeb & Loeb. Heck, some practitioners don’t even know how online advertising works.

Earlier this week, AdExchanger asked FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya during his keynote at the NAD’s conference on advertising law in Washington, DC, why the commission decided to sue Kochava rather than any other ad tech company with a location data business. And, according to Bedoya, Kochava was singled out for a reason.

Last week, I tuned into the entire FTC forum on “surveillance capitalism” and data security – all five-plus hours of it (you’re welcome?) – and this is my main takeaway: The online advertising industry needs to find a new way to talk about itself.

Nabiha Syed is CEO of The Markup, a non-profit newsroom that runs in-depth investigations into how companies large and small (but mostly large), use technology to reshape society – and it’s having an impact. The new lawsuit facing Meta and several hospitals over data sharing used to target ads on Facebook? Yep, that’s thanks to The Markup.

Richard Russell, VP of omnichannel marketing at Deckers Brands, parent company of Ugg and Teva, has been on a mission to “wean people off of using return on ad spend as the end-all be-all metric” and to reorient the company’s marketing strategy to focus on getting the most out of first-party data.

Amid the reeling following cookie deprecation, industry pundits are also sounding the alarm over the viability of IP addresses as an actionable identifier. But when it comes to streaming media advertising and monetization, which is largely underpinned by IPs, there’s still more good news than bad, writes Andre Swanston, SVP of Media & Entertainment Vertical at TransUnion.

It was hard to imagine how mobile measurement platforms could survive Apple’s ATT changes. But the MMPs aren’t dying, they’re thriving, says Branch’s Alex Bauer, on the heels of raising $300 million.

Privacy and data security aren’t just legal issues – they are also customer experience issues. Consumers don’t like their data “changing hands under the table,” says ActionIQ CEO Tasso Argyros.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Bob Walczak, CEO, MadTech Advisors.  The future is cookieless. This we all know. But the industry faces a long road ahead before cookieless audience targeting becomes the norm. Sure, context and cohort targeting provide […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Julie Rubash, chief privacy counsel at Sourcepoint.  Dark patterns – or website designs that manipulate users into performing specific actions – are widespread these days. In fact, one recent study from Princeton examined 11,000 shopping […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework left the mobile ecosystem reeling – but the writing was on the wall, says AppsFlyer CEO Oren Kaniel on this week’s episode. ATT reminds him of when Apple pulled the plug on UDID and replaced it with the IDFA.

The word of the year, at least according to Collins English Dictionary, is “NFT.” Putting aside the fact that NFT is an acronym and not a word, consider a proposal that the word of the year for 2021 be “consent.”

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Thanh Do, product marketing manager at Permutive. It’s no secret that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework has rocked the advertising industry. Before the introduction of opt-in consent, 70% of users enabled cross-app tracking. […]

Roast turkey wasn’t the only thing to gorge on this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top antitrust regulator, published a 125-page document outlining the next phase of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox. (You can read the whole shebang here.) The document contains an updated set […]

Programmatic and privacy don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even though they’re often treated that way, according to Joe Root, CEO and co-founder of London-based publisher technology startup Permutive. “A privacy-first web is about removing the data leakage that’s inherent in programmatic,” Root said. Permutive aims to stop that leakage with technology infrastructure to preserve […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis. Snapchat disappointed us all last week and Facebook did the same on Monday. The social media giants keep making the headlines as they struggle to […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Rachel Miller, director of marketing communications at Permission.io. California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently sent enforcement letters that clarify the scope of what is considered a data sale under the […]

Lou Paskalis is on a mission to “save marketing from itself.” “It has to go from what it is today, which is something I sort of endure to get things done, to something I love because it enables me to do things,” Paskalis says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. Paskalis is a recognizable […]

Privacy is the number one reason why marketers say they want to partner with a customer data platform. Twenty-six percent of marketers cite data compliance and ensuring consumer privacy as the top benefits of working with a CDP provider, according to the companies surveyed by Advertiser Perceptions in its wave on the CDP market covering […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at BlueConic. It’s been a bad couple of weeks for what I’ll call “the data economy.” A new study from the journal Nature Communications laid bare […]

Multinational brands and ad tech companies doing business in China will have new hoops to jump through starting November 1. That’s when China’s newly passed privacy regulation, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), goes into effect. The National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, voted to adopt the law on August 21. That doesn’t leave […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Kerri Driscoll, VP of marketing strategy at Merkle. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced its intention to put additional privacy parameters in place for email with its Mail Privacy […]