The new law has been in black and white for more than two years – but, still, the proof of its pudding will only be known after the final deadline for compliance comes in to effect this coming May.
That is according to one ad-tech company exec thinking through the effects of the European Commission’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The new law gives European consumers significant new powers to stop companies anywhere in the world from collecting and processing their personal data, including the right to stop automated decisioning- something which much modern advertising technology depends.
“While the broad outlines of the legislation are reasonably well understood, there’s an awful lot of detail that’s still going to need to be worked out and tested over time,” says AppNexus publisher strategy SVP Tom Shields in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Anyone who tells you they’re 100% prepared, knows exactly what they’re doing, probably doesn’t fully understand exactly what the situation is right now.”
GDPR came in to effect back in 2016, updating prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, chiefly tighter consent conditions for citizens’ data to be collected.
Breaching the new rules risks incurring a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million.
“We’ve invested tremendous time and resources in being prepared for GDPR,” AppNexus’ Shields says.
“There certainly have been doomsayer predictions who have said that the result of this is only going to be that the large companies get larger, and all the small companies die out. I don’t think that’s the case.
“AppNexus is putting a lot of our code into open-source, so that we can enable smaller publishers and smaller technology providers to continue to be able to survive and thrive in this new world.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
