This week's review of ad fraud and privacy in the digital advertising space:
Pixalate released the first installment of its CTV Ad Fraud Series, highlighting unique forms of invalid traffic (IVT) — known as ad fraud — across the Connected TV (CTV) programmatic advertising marketplace. The first report is a close look at “app spoofing” in CTV.
During Q2 2022, Pixalate measured an app spoofing rate of 3.4% across all open programmatic ad impressions purportedly served on Roku devices and nearly 5% among impressions purportedly served on Amazon Fire TV devices.
Click here to download the list of the top 20 CTV apps with primarily programmatic ads on Roku and Amazon Fire TV that were impacted by app spoofing for the two-week period between July 1-15, 2022.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to start drafting new online privacy rules imminently, according to several inside sources. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “if adopted, the [new] rules could impose significant new responsibilities on businesses that handle consumer data, including potentially barring certain kinds of data collection practices.”
The move marks an aggressive turn for the FTC under the leadership of Chairwoman Lina Khan, who has been vocal in her criticism of big tech. The rules could take several years to be enacted and could go a number of different ways. The agency has hinted that it would be giving more attention to measures impacting children’s privacy, with the rise of time spent online by children as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pathmatics released its Q2 2022 Digital Digest report revealing that U.S. ad platforms have grown quarter-over-quarter and “that digital ad spend in the U.S. reached $23.5 billion, an 11.7 percent increase from Q1 2022.”
Digiday reported that since Apple’s App Tracking Transparency tool doesn’t seem to be doing the most effective job in protecting users’ privacy, Apple will likely begin to “aggressively enforce its crackdown on the excessive tracking of its customers.”
Almost a year after unveiling new privacy measures, experts are looking to Apple to see whether they will really beef up security guidelines for apps and actually enforce those guidelines. Predictions range from Apple making privacy relay a default feature in its next upgrade or will adopt similar practices to those of Google’s privacy “sandbox.”
Politico reported on efforts in Congress to implement legislation to put some constraints on major social media platforms like Meta. The Senate Commerce Committee has advanced two bills for consideration by the full Senate– the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Act (commonly known as COPPA 2.0) and the Kids Online Safety Act. These bills collectively would “ban targeted ads aimed at kids under 16, require tech firms to establish default safety tools to protect children online and give parents more control over their children’s web surfing.”
There is still some argument in favor of a bill that would more broadly protect children and adults, but that bill would preempt some state privacy laws that are already in place in some states including California.
