The European Union's Global Data Protection Regulation took effect today, and many popular websites seem squared away in having their consent aspect in place. The new regime, more commonly known as GDPR, is intended to provide people in the EU's 28 countries more control of their data.
In its simplest form, GDPR is "setting guardrails around surveillance marketing and surveillance advertising," Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester, previously told Ad Age.
That means contextual advertising—i.e. showing ads for "Gatorade" to someone visiting a football-focused website—is completely fine. What's not is tracking consumers all over the web while modeling data against personal information without consent, Khatibloo says. Most people understand that ads pay the bills for many services in a general sense, but GDPR has arrived to make sure companies track only if they have permission.
Unlike here in the U.S., consumers in the E.U. can disagree with a platform or publisher's terms of service and still have access to content or features.
Ad Age used a virtual private network, or VPN, to see what E.U. citizens are seeing across major publishing sites. A VPN can be used to make the internet think you're in Brussels, for example, instead of Chicago, or wherever you actually are. Ad Age went with Luxembourg.
Yahoo: Oath's Yahoo provides a clear explanation of how it is managing data and allows users to easily toggle among the companies that can capture information.