EU court rules that tracking-based online ads are illegal

The Brussels Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that the use of tracking by online advertisers relies on an inadequate consent model and is illegal in Europe.

The ruling, which is not available in English, makes clear that an existing standard, known as the Transparency and Consent Framework, is insufficient under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to an Amnesty International summary of the decision. 

Companies have long relied on that framework as a means of continuing to target advertising under the GDPR.

Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and X are most impacted by the decision because the court ruled that the pop-ups they typically use to ask for consent to track consumers and target advertising do not do enough to counter privacy violations inherent to the so-called real-time bidding process, Amnesty said of the ruling. 

Real-time bidding is a system where advertisers can target ads to individuals as they are browsing the web and bid on individual ad impressions immediately based on the type of content consumers are reading.

“Every time you load a website this personal information is shared with thousands of companies who then bid to show you an advert without proper control over your information and that’s a massive privacy breach,” Hannah Storey, Amnesty International Policy Advisor on Technology and Human Rights, said in a statement.

“This a major win for the right to privacy and a clear message that the tech industry should move away from surveillance-based advertising to a more rights-respecting model.” 

Fraud in the online advertising ecosystem is also a growing problem, particularly for Meta, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hosted almost half of all reported scam ads on Zelle for JPMorgan Chase  from 2023 to 2024, the Journal reported.

A 2022 Meta internal assessment described in company documents obtained by the Journal showed that 70% of newly active Meta advertisers were pushing illegal goods, scams or “low quality” products.