Data Privacy

Crimson Hexagon is back in business on Facebook and Instagram – mostly. The social analytics platform, which uses AI to analyze public data across social networks, said Friday that most of its customers have had their access restored to both Facebook and Instagram data since the end of last week. The process was far swifter for […]

The Trump administration’s Commerce Department is in talks with tech and internet providers, including Facebook, Google, AT&T and Comcast, to craft a proposal addressing online privacy. The Washington Post reported the news Friday. Why now? The administration is succumbing to pressure amid global criticism that a lack of online privacy regulation led to foreign meddling […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an independent audience strategy consultant.  Today’s increasingly enhanced privacy era requires a closer collaboration between media companies and their audiences, based on a true value exchange, trust and transparency. Users who […]

Even Facebook isn’t impervious to the downstream effects of repeated scandals, macro privacy trends and the law of large numbers. With Cambridge Analytica, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and flatlining use in North America, which is Facebook’s most lucrative market, the buck had to stop, or at least stall, sometime. It did so on Wednesday […]

Federal Trade Commission members said during a House hearing Wednesday that the FTC does not have the authority to adequately punish companies that misuse consumer data. Several data privacy scandals over the last year and a half prompted the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. Equifax’s data breach in 2017, for example, released personal information […]

Google was hit with a $5.1 billion fine by the European Union on Wednesday for antitrust practices around the Android mobile operating system – a move that underscores Europe’s willingness to issue steep financial penalties for bad behavior. And there’s another bludgeon in the EU’s cache that Google – and the advertising world in general […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Grow Big Or Go Home HBO is at a crossroads and its new corporate manager plans to make a change, a recording from a recent company-wide town hall meeting suggests. John Stankey, the AT&T executive who now oversees the Time Warner media properties, says […]

The 2018 World Cup has featured an exciting range of upsets and contenders, but some World Cup marketers see early signs of trouble thanks to GDPR throwing a wrench into digital advertising and the absence of the US team. GDPR, which became law less than a month before the soccer tournament, is especially painful for […]

Summer Of Our Missed Consent Google is causing consternation and potential GDPR violations by delaying its implementation of the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework, a collaborative model for publishers to gather consent and transmit that consent up the supply chain, Reuters reports. Google promised to fully integrate with the industry framework by August, but […]

The sweeping California privacy law, AB 375, that was rushed onto Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for his 11th-hour signature last week won’t go into effect until 2020. The new law gives consumers a host of new rights, including the ability to compel companies to share what data has been collected about them, the right to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. In-House Helpers Consultancies are cashing in on in-housing. Firms like PwC, Accenture and Deloitte are using the media transparency debate to position themselves as in-housing experts, picking up marginal revenue – and helping brands cut out agencies in the process, reports Digiday. Because consulting […]

 Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The GDPR Pipe Cleaner Programmatic ad spend has rebounded a bit in Europe after contracting a month ago when GDPR came into effect. Clients cut programmatic by as much as 50% in the days following enforcement, since many publishers lacked consent technology and advertisers […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Weed Whacks Influencers Influencer marketing has a fraud problem, and Unilever CMO Keith Weed has had enough of it. At the Cannes Lions festival, Weed said Unilever will no longer work with influencers who buy followers to inflate audience and engagement metrics. Unilever will […]

Advertisers know linear TV spots drive store visits. Proving it is another story. On Tuesday, Snap-owned location company Placed released a tool that attempts to tie the two together. To power its offering, Placed is licensing viewership data from Inscape, the data division within smart-TV manufacturer Vizio, which has access to around 8 million opted-in […]

While both the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation address the collection of personal information by businesses, they are actually quite different. Here’s where they diverge and why the advertising trade orgs are lobbying like bandits to block the California act’s passage. The IAB, DMA, ANA, 4As and NAI decried the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The House Always Wins As YouTube keeps dialing up brand safety protections, creators in marginal or disreputable categories are feeling the brunt. A relatively small but active group of creators who stream from inside casinos (because people like to watch others gambling) have found […]

Google is reversing its policy for its consent management platform (CMP) that initially capped at 12 the number of vendors a publisher can list in opt-in messages, following critical feedback from publishers and the ad tech industry. The platform now has no limit. “The change being made now is in line with our priority of […]

Emodo, Ericsson’s mobile ad platform for telcos, is aiming to boost the quality of location data in the ad ecosystem with a tool launched Thursday that uses carrier data to verify mobile audiences on a pre-bid basis. Marketers are shelling out for bad targeting and it’s akin to flushing their budgets down the toilet, said […]

Even if Google registers its entire product stack with the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), there will still be important differences between Google’s GDPR solution and the programmatic ecosystem. Google has a huge advantage because of its end-to-end status in the online supply chain, said Blake Brannon, VP of product at the privacy […]

Social plugins, your cookie-dropping days are numbered – on Safari, at least. At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced that the third-party widgets that litter the internet will no longer be able to place cookies on visitors using Safari. “We’ve all seen these like buttons and share buttons and these comment fields,” said Craig […]

Apple is reportedly headed once more into the fray with the launch of a contextual ad network that could include inventory from Pinterest, Snap and a collective of other apps in the App Store. The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, may seem strange in light of macro events like Facebook’s data scandal […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fountain Of Youth The online media habits of US teenagers have changed dramatically since Pew Research last conducted a major survey of 13-17-year-olds. From 2014 to 2015, Facebook was used by 71% of US teens, then the only social platform with a clear majority, […]

The European Union’s GDPR regulations have been in force for less than a week, but ad tech exchange players are already feeling whiplash. The crux of the problem is advertising technology vendors must have user consent for data-driven advertising – yet there are only two scaled ways to get it. Either use Google’s GDPR pipeline […]

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may have originated in Europe, but its reach and influence stretches across the globe, including to the US. For example, it’s actually easier for large enterprises to apply standards globally. Having already made a major effort to comply with GDPR for EU citizen data, it’s only logical to stay […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Many Appy Returns It’s a truism that iOS users and Apple App Store downloads generate more value for brands than downloads that happen through Google’s Play store. But over the past couple of years Apple has been running away with the market, according to […]

May 25 is here and let’s pretend that companies up and down the digital supply chain are ready for the General Data Protection Regulation enforcement deadline. Good. Now it’s time to start fretting about ePrivacy. Many in the advertising industry have treated ePrivacy almost as an afterthought in the frenzied lead-up to the GDPR enforcement […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks is all about – what else? – GDPR. On the eve of the May 25 compliance deadline, we invite guest Patrick Salyer, CEO of SAP-owned identity management platform Gigya, to talk about the enforcement and long-term impact of the regulation. […]

Data matching and cookie syncing aren’t verboten under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but getting the consent to do it is another story altogether, since consumers need to know exactly what they’re signing up for when they provide unambiguous and specific consent. Like most vendors in the ad tech ecosystem, companies that onboard data […]

by Sarah Sluis, Alison Weissbrot and Ryan Joe Everyone in the industry claims – at least publicly – to be ready for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which starts Friday. But how can that be true? There are too many unknowns to predict what will happen when the industrywide regulation kicks in. AdExchanger turned […]

Anyone hoping for an intense grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his testimony Tuesday before European politicians in Brussels can keep on waiting. Zuckerberg trotted out familiar talking points and was sheltered from the intensity and awkward eye contact of real interrogation by a strange format, in which members of the EU Parliament asked […]