back to article Microsoft ad subsidiary Xandr accused of violating GDPR

Microsoft's advertising subsidiary is the target of a complaint from EU privacy advocates accusing it of "highly intrusive data processing" as well as breaking several General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules. The complaint [PDF], filed today in Italy by the perennial privacy defenders at noyb (none of your business), …

  1. neilg

    Yet another advert related story.

    I want to know who's paying for all these "views" and "clicks". I'Are they not aware that just short of 100% are fraudulent!

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Yet another advert related story.

      I want to know who's paying for all these "views" and "clicks".

      In general, advertisers. In particular the budgets of the advertisers' sales and marketing departments. authorised by the depertments' executives.

      Are they not aware that just short of 100% are fraudulent!

      Where "they" are the executives, I don't think you'd be easily able to prove they know. Whan a man's salary depends on it etc.

    2. Alumoi Silver badge

      Re: Yet another advert related story.

      You, me and everybody who buys anything.

    3. Paul Herber Silver badge

      Re: Yet another advert related story.

      If you knew as much as I do about marketing you'd know that the key is the segmentation of that 100%. Besides, isn't that exactly the wrong shade of puce for this product?

    4. train_wreck

      Re: Yet another advert related story.

      It’s not a lie if everyone believes it. <rollsafe.jpg>

  2. train_wreck

    At first I thought “noyb” was just bog standard Reg snark, but that’s actually what they’re called. 10/10. I sincerely hope an MS legal hound is forced to repeat “noyb” ad nauseum during the proceedings.

  3. Zibob Silver badge

    Aura, delete me, etc.

    So, are they now in breach of advertising, as they say they will contact and make these companies delete your information.

    If Xandr are ignoring the laws does that then make both parties liable. One for not doing their job and the other knowingly lying about their abilities.

    That's really my problem with these services, they are marketed at people with scare tactics and then effectively just sit s a subscription taking money for a task that by their own admission will never be complete*, but now also openly known that their base product does not exist.

    *they say in their ads about these data brokers being able to just re-buy/scrape your data anyway and having to repeadly ask on a constant basis to delete your information.

  4. Donn Bly

    Loophole?

    It looks like the data brokers are trying to establish a loophole, all they have to do is make sure that some of the information is inaccurate and they can't be held accountable. Being able to identify data as belonging to a single user, and being able to prove that you are that single user, are two different things. If the user is unemployed, and the uuid that they are requesting to have removed is marked as a student or being employed, then the mismatch would "prove" that they AREN'T that particular user and thus wouldn't have the right to have that data removed - even if everything else matched.

    I really do miss the days of untargeted advertising. When a web ad was a just digital billboard and it didn't matter which eyeballs saw it, and no data was collected other than the number of impressions on the page.

    But I do have to shake my head, because we have one side of governments that want to eliminate anonymity and track every action on the web back to a specific user (for the children, for course), while the other side of the same governments simultaneously want all traffic to be anonymous. Of course, these are the same government that want "secure" encryption with a back door. In the mean time, I will just do my part to continue to feed bogus information to the algorithms so that the data brokers really DON'T know who I am.

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