A small French privacy ruling could remake adtech
The interminable pile of pop-ups on the EU web has become extremely annoying, and I don't blame ad firms and publishers for seeking to minimise the disruption to the user experience.At the same time, the protections that the GDPR seeks to provide are very important and it's absolutely right to protect them in law.But what value is there in constant boxes that users become accustomed to clicking through like trained monkeys? It devalues the whole point of the GDPR because no sane person would actually read the policies for every single website to see if their data is being used reasonably or not.I personally think that there should be a limited, well-defined set of data that can be transmitted to ad exchanges under an assumed consent. Fully anonymised and broad demographic data (eg: age range, sex, city, etc) for example. Anything beyond that should require an explicit consent.This should encourage most publishers to do the right thing, because if you're doing something that requires a consent pop-up, it probably means you're up to no good.