Overheard at IAB’s ALM: ‘Big Tech is now the de facto global regulator’

By Ronan Shields

The IAB’s ALM took place this week where industry leaders debated grappling with enhanced privacy requirements in the day-to-day runnings of their ad operations with the agenda of the week’s proceedings underpinned by the quest for “privacy-enhancing technologies.”

Against the backdrop of regulators taking pot-shots at industry attempts to explain the inner workings of ad tech to the public under GDPR requirements, the debate turned to how not to fall afoul of fragmented privacy regulations.

Below is a round-up of some of the key talking points discussed as part of the agenda that saw policy experts, elected representatives and industry luminaries dispense advice from the (virtual) IAB conference stage.

Big Tech is the default global regulator of data usage

In conversation with IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur, ViacomCBS’s vp of privacy Brandon Seltenrich and Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Cafe Media debated navigating the industry’s fragmented privacy landscape.

I think there’s already agreement that we need to have some federal standards that apply to internet policy

Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester (Dem-De.)

Scaled media and advertising businesses now have to deal with an increasingly fragmented landscape when it comes to diverse privacy regulations — everything from GDPR to CCPA, etc. in the U.S. — all while attempting to achieve some kind of operational consistency across the globe.

Each of the participants noted that while the regulatory landscape is an ever-evolving, and confusing one, it’s best to use the (subsequent) privacy requirements of platform providers such as Apple and Google as a proxy.

“I think Big Tech has, in some ways, have become the de facto regulator in a lot of ways,” said Bannister, adding that their policy changes have a more wide-ranging impact than lawmakers whose across the U.S. and EU. This is because laws such as GDPR are restricted to the European economic area, etc., while the application of policies like Apple’s privacy safeguards has had a global reach.

Meanwhile, Seltenrich explained how his team adopts a pragmatic approach to balancing privacy necessities with commercial demands from other departments in ViacomCBS’ operations.

“For us, it’s about trying to create playbooks, we’re a small team and can’t be in all the sales calls,” he said. “We create a common playbook … that [sales] teams can rely upon and then bring us in for additional questions, escalation, education.”

Google: ‘Don’t worry … it gets better third time around’

Separately, David Temkin, director, product management, ads privacy and user trust at Google, attempted to reassure conference attendees that the online advertising giant’s Privacy Sandbox rollout will be a magnanimous one — a notion that is not universally held throughout the rest of the industry.

Addressing concerns over the pending rollout of Google Topics — the privacy-enhancing ad targeting alternative to replace the now-defunct FLoCs proposals — Temkin said …read more

Source:: Digiday