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This note examines a Belgian court ruling against Facebook’s tracking and approach to consent. Facebook and adtech companies should expect tough sanctions when they find themselves before […]

This note examines Google’s recent announcement on the GDPR. Google has sensibly adopted non-personal ad targeting. This is very significant step forward and signals a change in the […]

The follow up to the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ most listened to podcast of 2017.  Angelique Carson of the International Association of Privacy Professionals quizzes PageFair’s Dr Johnny […]

Google and Facebook will be disrupted by the new European data protection rules that are due to apply in May 2018. This note explains how.  Google and Facebook will be unable to use the […]

“Brand safety and the unblocked web” presents the findings of a research collaboration between the UK advertisers body ISBA, the Advertising Research Foundation, and PageFair. It shows how […]

This whitepaper, “The Hidden Cost of Adblock”, presents the primary findings of research by Professor Benjamin Shiller (Brandeis University), Professor Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota and the […]

In 2015 Scott Cunningham, the founder of IAB TechLab, told the world “we messed up” on behalf of the advertising industry. His was the first major industry […]

The “legitimate interest” provision in the GDPR will not save behavioral advertising and data brokers from the challenge of obtaining consent for personally identifiable data.
As previous PageFair analysis illustrates, personally identifiable data (PII) will become toxic except where it has been obtained and used with consent once the General Data Protection Regulation is applied in May 2018.
Even so, many advertising intermediaries believe that they can continue to use PII data without consent because of an apparent carve-out related to “legitimate interest” contained in the GDPR. This is a false hope.

This note is a layman’s guide to how the “block lists” that power adblocking work.
A block list contains tens of thousands of rules that govern how a website should be displayed. There are two types of rules. “Filter” rules define what should be blocked. “Exception” rules define what content should be displayed. The most popular block list, “EasyList”, contains tens of thousands of these filters and exceptions.

I spoke with Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next (DCN), which represents the most prestigious publishers in the world, including The New York Times, The Financial […]