📲Where we are now
Privacy laws around the world – a first step in the right direction
Rapid technological developments and globalization, in addition to numerous scandals related to privacy violations, has led some administrations to develop data protection legislations that consider illegal many of the practices conducted today. These privacy laws provide a significantly level of privacy guarantees to people, and obligations on brands that process people’s personal data. Two important recurring principles and concepts we can find in most of these privacy laws – and which are relevant for our project as explained in this whitepaper – are the “transparency and information requirement” and “data subject rights”.
- (a) Transparancy and information requirements
The principle of transparency requires brands to provide clear, precise and easily accessible information to people about how their personal data will be used. This mean that information addressed to the public or to the data subject must be concise, easily accessible and easy to understand, in clear and plain language and, additionally, where appropriate, by using visualization[1].
In addition, brands have an information requirement when collecting personal data from a data subject [read: an individual]. Each brand needs to provide the data subject (you) it collects information from, with relevant information about a number of topics that helps you understand more about how your personal data is being used.
Although the principles are a welcome step into the right direction, the execution of it by brands today is lacking. Even if consumers (you) would understand the information that is send to them, there is not much room for a response or a dialogue. What if you do not agree with certain aspects in a privacy policy? What if you consider that a brand shouldn’t know your home address when offering you (only) a digital service? Again, there are no tools available to level the playing field between brands and people.
- (b) Data subject rights
People (“data subjects” (you) in the framework of privacy laws) have rights in relation to their personal data, called “data subject rights” (short DSRs). Under certain conditions, these rights can be enforced against brands that process personal data.
These rights[1] may include e.g. (i) the right to information - the right to be informed about how a brand uses your personal data; (ii) the right to access – ask access to personal data that is being processed by a brand (e.g. when you want to know just how much data a company has about you); (iii) the right to be forgotten – ask a brand to delete your data (e.g. when you don’t want to receive any products anymore); (iv) the right to object to direct marketing – ask a brand to stop sending you promotional or marketing messages (e.g. when you receive emails about products and services you do not want); and (v) the right to rectification – ask a brand to rectify personal information about you that is inaccurate or incomplete (e.g. they have your old address or there is a typo in your name);
These privacy laws (e.g., GDRP, CCPA; LGDP) include obligations for brands in relation to data subject rights, e.g. (i) inform consumers that these rights exist; (ii) help consumers exercise them; (iii) timely respond to a customer who exercises these rights,mostly within a period of 15 to 30 days; and (iv) do this all in a transparent way, and at no cost to the individual.[1]
These principles aim to give individuals more autonomy over their personal data. However, people today are often not aware these rights exist. Even if they would, how do you exercise them? There is a lack of educational resources and necessary tools to effectively make use of these rights by people.
The end of cookies – post-cookie privacy preserving solutions
One of the most important proposals to combat the misuse of personal data in the Ad-Tech industry is to eliminate third-party cookies, which is the most widespread technique to conduct – privacy threatening – tracking of people on the web.[1] There is a very intense and still open debate about what is referred to as the “post-cookies era” in the context of online advertising. Different alternatives are being proposed, some of which opt for creating respectful unique user IDs that respond to the requirements of new data protection legislation such as explicit user consent.
Google took a very important step towards the elimination of unique identifiers and proposed FLOC (Federated Learning of Cohorts)[2], a solution where people will be assigned to a cohort formed by N (N > 1000) users, and only the cohort ID of a user will be revealed to third parties.
A second group of solutions, known as PIM (Personal Identity Management) platforms offer consent-based advertising. In this case, the PIM handles people’s data, typically offering you the option to control your data and with whom it can be shared. This allows people to participate in the online advertising scheme through a truly consent-based process.
A final group of solutions offer privacy-preserving advertising approaches that in spirit try to achieve what we refer to in the Whitepapers as Zero Knowledge AdvertisingTM (or ZKA), namely an advertising ecosystem where no personal data from an internet user is shared with third parties (a.o. advertisers, publishers, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms), whereas the individual still receives relevant ads anonymously. An example thereof is Brave, who offers what we call “passive” ZKA, whereas our solution offers “active” ZKA. More about that distinction and how we improve further on existing passive ZKA solutions can be found in the “competitor” section of our Whitepaper.
Consumers want control, but lack the knowledge and tools
Today, you have no control over the use of your personal data. Many people (probably many like you reading this paper) demand more control and are willing to take action to take back ownership of their digital lives. A recent consumer privacy survey conducted by Cisco[1] interviewing 2,600 adult respondents in 12 of the world's largest economies (five in Europe, four in Asia Pacific, and three in the Americas) – shows that people increasingly care about their personal data and want to actively take action to protect it, but that they are lacking the knowledge and tools to do it.
That is where Profila steps in, by providing people with the tools to control their data.
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