Data Privacy

Google tells its side of the story in a motion to dismiss the antitrust case it’s facing – but where does the truth lie? Also: Google unveils its cookie-free Topics API, a rundown on California’s follow-up privacy law (CPRA) and a quick explainer on the latest privacy bill to hit the Hill: the ominously named Banning Surveillance Advertising Act.

The Privacy Sandbox is bursting with news this week. On Thursday, Google shared a slightly more concrete testing timeline for its FLEDGE and Core Attribution reporting API. Two days before, on Tuesday, Google announced the Topics API, a new proposal for post-cookie interest-based advertising that now replaces FLoC. Google, which teased earlier this week that […]

On Tuesday, just a few days after filing a motion to dismiss the state AG-led antitrust lawsuit against its advertising business, Google announced Topics, a new proposal for the Privacy Sandbox that replaces the FLoC API, which is being sent to bird heaven.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cookie Cutters A coalition of large German advertisers and Axel Springer, the biggest German publisher, are petitioning the EU legislature to stop Google from removing third-party cookies in Chrome, the Financial Times reports.  Chrome already delayed cookie deprecation from Q2 this year to the […]

In September, the California Privacy Protection Agency made a call for feedback on new and outstanding issues not addressed by existing implementation regulations for CCPA, and the comments are in. One of the most hotly debated issues had to do with consent interfaces.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TC Effed? The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, a privacy advocacy group, published a blog post last week arguing that IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the industry’s mechanism to convey consent data in online ad bids, cannot be reliably audited and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Feed The Hand That Bites You Advertising insiders have become expert witnesses, so to speak, in antitrust battles with Big Tech.  There’s Tom Chavez, who co-founded and sold ad tech startups to Microsoft and Salesforce. He now operates a venture fund that invests in […]

More than a year after 17 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the hits keep coming. A newly unredacted version of the suit – now ballooned to 242 pages – dropped on Friday and provides quite the scratch-off surprise. AdExchanger has been busy polling the industry and reading up on the latest allegations about how Google […]

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced a joint effort to rewrite US antitrust law for handling mergers and acquisitions. Don’t hold your breath, though The two agencies are opening a 60-day public comment period for individuals, companies and organizations to submit concerns about M&A and antitrust regulation. That material will […]

OpenX CEO John Gentry on why the company isn’t going public in 2022, its recent COPPA settlement with the FTC and the ongoing challenge of ensuring quality supply in an open exchange.

The programmatic advertising landscape has never faced more complexity or challenges than it does today. However, at the same time, the opportunity for growth and refinement has never been greater. Here’s how marketers can take advantage of key trends shaping the space in 2022 and beyond, writes Sameer Sondhi, Co-CEO at Verve Group.

It’s time to stop talking and start doing. That’s the raison d’être, in a nutshell, behind a new community group – the Private Advertising Technology Community Group – housed within the World Wide Web Consortium.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Neeva Have I Eeva Paid To Search  The search engine startup Neeva launched its $5 per-month tier on Wednesday, Fast Company reports.  It’s small news – Neeva has some hundreds of thousands of users – but it’s an important marker because at least someone’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Relay Interference  Mobile carriers hate Apple iCloud Private Relay, an iOS 15 feature that encrypts location data, IP addresses and Safari traffic so that no companies, including Apple, can track web usage. In Europe, four carriers – ​​T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone and Telefónica – are […]

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.

Marketing on the web is undergoing a monumental shift as third-party cookies are phased out. But the real problem is that our industry has gotten so used to them that we’ve missed an important fact: Cookies were never intended to do the heavy lifting we’ve come to rely on, writes Erica Schmidt, Global CEO of Matterkind.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Double Dutch Salesforce and Oracle got a holiday gift from the Court of Amsterdam in the Netherlands last week, which dismissed a lawsuit brought against them by The Privacy Collective (TPC), a data privacy advocacy group.  TPC alleged that the companies breached the […]

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

A picture – or a comic in this case – is worth a thousand words. But each of our most popular comics of 2021 illustrated a key development in the world of advertising and media this year, from the end of last-click attribution and the growth of CTV to mega media mergers and the birds in Google’s Privacy Sandbox. These are the stories behind our top comics of the past year.

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 ripple effects of Google’s decisions dominated AdExchanger’s top story list in 2021.

2021 brought both bounty (IPOs) and challenges (targeting). As ad tech surfed the wave of IPOs, it also weathered attacks on targeting and measurement, as online privacy increasingly became a priority for governments, platforms and people.

Keeping Track Third-party trackers were hosed by GDPR, right?  Perhaps not.  A University of Oxford study found that third-party trackers in Google Play and Apple iOS apps remain relatively unchanged. “The same handful of third-party tracking companies have similar prevalence and prominence,” according to the Internet Policy Review journal. The number of apps with zero […]

The “Big Tent” Backlash The IAB announced last week that advertising and media agencies will now be able to join the industry trade association as members. All the big agencies are already partners out of the gate.  The IAB makes the case that online advertising must span many categories to work effectively, and the industry […]

As the CPRA tightens CCPA’s restrictions, are companies that process data for online behavioral advertising still considered “service providers” based on the CPRA’s new definition and parameters? Richard Eisert, partner and co-chair of advertising, and Zachary Klein, associate, both at Davis+Gilbert, dig in.

Nothing in ad tech is ever easy. Despite previously signaling interest in serving as an administrator for Unified ID 2.0 earlier this year, the IAB Tech Lab is still on the fence about taking on this role for the open-source initiative to replace third-party cookies with email-based IDs.

An Axe To Grindr Norway’s data protection authority (DPA) fined Grindr $7 million for GDPR violations. The Norwegian watchdog says Grindr passed data to third parties without consent, and that it shared data on sexual orientation, which is prohibited regardless. The full text is worth reading.  Grindr, an LGBTQ dating app, objected on the grounds […]

Criteo is buying IPONWEB, the engineering company that built most of the underlying infrastructure for the ad tech ecosystem. The deal represents a huge chess move on the part of Criteo. So, what does Criteo get from acquiring the company responsible for building the foundation of programmatic advertising as it exists today?

“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. […]

Amazon The Impervious Google and Facebook are reeling from data privacy changes. Tim Cook warned investors that Apple underestimated part shortages and would not meet demand until next year. Macy’s slimmed its store inventory. Disney’s production schedules are delayed by months and even years. And Amazon is – doing great. The ongoing supply-chain drama, COVID-19 fallout […]