Christo Wilson

Despite being the financial foundation for the modern digital economy, online advertising lacks both technical and legal standards governing the collection of tracking data from users and the display of digital advertisements. I argue that this lack of standards is at the root of many problems that rob users of their privacy, autonomy, and rights under the law. To name just a few problems: controlling where and when ads are displayed online is an error prone and laborious task because there are no machine-readable standards for the disclosure of promoted content; users' online behavior continues to be tracked with impunity because there is a strong financial incentive to "innovate" new tracking technologies, and there is no regulatory framework that constrains these technologies; and users are often frustrated when attempting to activate their data subject rights because it is unclear what unique identifier their data is associated with. While emerging technical standards like Global Privacy Control are undoubtedly a step forward for online privacy, they are not designed to address these problems.
 
 In this piece, I argue that additional technical and legal standards, co-designed to work in tandem, would go a long way to addressing these problems. I propose two complementary efforts: one to standardize and mandate the use of an <ad> tag to disclose digital advertisements, and another to standardize and mandate the use of an API for tracking identifiers on the Web. I discuss the technical details of these proposed standards, contrast them to previous and current technical efforts, and argue that these would be relatively straightforward to adopt in practice. I also discuss the regulatory dimensions of these standards, including the benefits they would bring to users and regulators, as well as policy challenges.