Once upon a long-forgotten time, the ePrivacy regulation was supposed to bring privacy to Europeans surfing the web. Back then, the UK ad industry was anxious to know how #ePrivacy would 'play out post-Brexit'. 2 questions:
Whatever happened to ePrivacy? And what to Brexit?
For the non-geeks among you, ePrivacy is meant to be the landmark data protection law to complete the work of GDPR. Drafts promise to regulate 'privacy-by-default' settings in browsers and make it harder to track users without consent.
For the past one-and-a-half years, ePrivacy has been held up in the Council by an unholy alliance of states such as Austria and Germany. Lobbyists suggest the publishing industry would suffer from curbing behavioural advertising, hence Axel Springer et al hate ePrivacy.
But in fact it is mainly the ad tech-based business model of Google, Facebook and Amazon that would suffer from ePrivacy, whereas smaller players that rely on ads targeted to products, rather than individuals, would probably do rather well out of it.
Crazy that this essential law has been delayed because publishers think they should side with internet giants, rather than consumers, and national governments buy into that. For the geeks out there, here's the source document: whatdotheyknow.com/request/525047…
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