Congress

Programmatic advertising is rife with misinformation. Brands can protect themselves this election season without blocking the news.

You’ve probably heard the term “surveillance advertising” – used with increasing frequency – in reference to companies with an Orwellian agenda to keep tabs on you at all times. See the recently introduced Banning Surveillance Advertising Act. Minus the hyperbole, surveillance advertising is the practice of serving ads to individuals based on their personal information. But […]

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 […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Runaway Runoffs With the control of the U.S. Senate hanging in the balance, all eyes were on Georgia leading up to the runoff elections on Jan. 5 –and where there are eyes, ad dollars follow. Axios reports that the two Georgia Senate runoff races […]

The House’s antitrust report on big tech, released last week, described the lopsided power dynamic at the W3C, where several “market participants” interviewed by the subcommittee said that they felt “bullied” by Google. The report claims that Google uses Chrome’s dominance in the browser market to “effectively set standards for the industry.” First, Chrome has […]

We’ve been talking so much these days about Google and identity that we’ve neglected getting into the other big Google story: antitrust. Congress dragged Google back to Washington again this week (virtually, at least) to examine about how its business impacts the competition. And this time, reports AdExchanger senior editor Allison Schiff, the senators were […]

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the practice of real-time bidding. (Read the letter here.) In a letter addressed to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons on Friday, the group, led by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., decries what it calls a “widespread privacy violations by companies […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Vs. … GDPR? Are the privacy-focused changes for the release of Apple’s iOS 14 in September compatible with the GDPR? Not according to a coalition of European advertising and publisher trade organizations, including IAB Europe and News Media Europe. In a letter to […]

The programmatic advertising ecosystem is a mess – even its main architect agrees. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Brian O’Kelley, founder and former CEO of AT&T-owned AppNexus, shared a three-pronged proposal for how he’d start to fix the tangled web he helped weave. First, give consumers control and transparency over their data. […]

After around a year of avoiding the spotlight, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spent nearly four hours fielding a grab bag of questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, discussing everything from the scope of Google’s data collection practices to alleged political bias in search results. The problem, as is often the case […]

It’s been a weird four months for Aleksandr Kogan. The 33-year-old went from an obscure research psychologist at Cambridge University to one of the villains at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Kogan, who testified Tuesday before a Senate Commerce subcommittee, apologized for his role in the controversy, but disputes that the data provided […]

Facebook’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, faced five hours of intense and technically savvy grilling by members of a parliamentary committee on Thursday. The takeaway: UK regulators don’t trust Facebook. To put it more pointedly in the words of British conservative MP Julian Knight: Facebook is a “morality-free zone” with no respect for consumer privacy or the […]

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced a second congressional grilling on Wednesday in Washington, DC, the company’s VP of ads and business product, Mark Rabkin, addressed a more ad-savvy audience at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco. The takeaway in SF: Facebook will continue to make policy changes to the way data is handled on its […]

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.” A contrite yet confident Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a suit rather than his usual gray T-shirt and jeans, testified Tuesday before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in Washington, […]

In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared statement for Congress, he describes how his company hopes to prevent illicit data sharing and enhance transparency around political advertising. The testimony, which will be delivered Wednesday, partially reiterates changes that Facebook publicized last week. Last Wednesday, Facebook detailed API data restrictions. And last Friday, it described the tools […]

The tech titans have testified about Russian election meddling. And after two days and multiple hours of questioning by members of Congress aimed at top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter and Google on Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s clear that Russian operatives continue to spread propaganda and sow social discontent using social media platforms and that said […]

The Republican-led House voted Tuesday to kill the Federal Communication Commission’s ISP privacy rules. All it needs now is the president’s signature, and that is all but assured. The White House issued a statement earlier in the day to say that President Trump strongly supports repealing the rules. Ad trade orgs rejoice. The House’s decision […]

Senators John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced legislation Wednesday that would require data brokers to be accountable and transparent about the information they collect and sell about consumers, but the direct marketing industry is already pushing back hard. “Consumers deserve to know what information about their personal lives is being […]

A Wednesday hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the operations of so-called “data brokers” highlighted the disconnect between data marketers and consumer advocates. The hearing followed the release of a report detailing the findings of a yearlong investigation into data marketers. The core disagreement revolves around the extent to which businesses […]

As online retailers face increasing pressure to inform consumers when their Web activities are being tracked, US Sen. Charles Schumer wants brick-and-mortar stores to do the same. Earlier this week, Schumer, D-NY, unveiled a code of conduct that would require retailers that collect consumers’ mobile data to post in-store signs letting shoppers know they are being […]