If you’re like me and really, really hate Adtech and those who push it, I have some good news. After the GDPR went into effect, advertisers had to have your explicit, informed, and affirmative consent to collect personal information about you. It was perfectly predictable that the advertisers would try to game the system, of course, and one way they’ve been doing that is by passing on permissions through contractual relationships. That means, for example, that when you agree to a particular site’s terms of use, they pass that permission on to the Adtech firms because they have a contractual relationship with them.
Now a French regulator has ruled that passing on permissions through contractual relationships is illegal. It’s hard for the non-lawyers among us—and probably hard for the lawyers too, for that matter—to know what the effect of this ruling will be but according to TechCrunch, it could mean the end of Adtech as it’s currently practiced.
The TechCrunch article has lots of details about the ruling and its probable consequences so it’s an excellent place to start if you want to understand what it all means. The TL;DR, as far as I can tell, is that it’s good news for those of us who want advertisers to stop spying on us.
Of course, all this applies only in the European Union but one can hope that it’s coming to a country near us too.