European Parliament body supports new limits on global giants' ad targeting

Tough new restrictions on combining user data for ad targeting and a total ban on processing the data of minors have become a lot more likely after a key parliamentary committee added important new clauses to the draft Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The European Parliament Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) has backed the addition of two important aspects to draft legislation that will affect giants like Meta and Google, TechCrunch reports.

Why it matters

Should a ban on targeting children enter European law, the problems of working out who is and isn’t a child could become too difficult to bear, therefore accelerating the shift from identity-based targeting to contextual advertising, which can theoretically work without any user data.

Gatekeepers

In a press release, the IMCO explains that the DMA regulation will apply to companies that offer “core platform services” but crucially such a company must turnover more than €8 billion annually in the European Economic Area and must be worth more than €80 billion on the stock market. It has also expanded its definition beyond what we think of as traditional platforms to browsers, virtual assistants, and connected TV – all areas in which Google, for instance, has major interests.

The proposed rules

• Additional consent: a gatekeeper shall, “for its own commercial purposes, and the placement of third-party advertising in its own services, refrain from combining personal data for the purpose of delivering targeted or micro-targeted advertising”, except if there is a “clear, explicit, renewed, informed consent”, the IMCO says, “in line with the General Data Protection Regulation”.
• Enhanced protections for minors: “personal data of minors shall not be processed for commercial purposes, such as direct marketing, profiling and behaviourally targeted advertising”.

Perspective

As ever, this is draft European law, which as TechCrunch’s senior reporter Natasha Lomas does a great job of outlining, must pass through a process of almost Kafkaesque complexity and will likely undergo many changes in the many months of negotiation that are yet to come.

However, this isn’t GDPR v.2. An important part of this new law is the shift of enforcement from a national process to a centralised body, which means that once it comes into effect, expect a much more activist stance.

Sourced from TechCrunch, EU.