• by Ray Schultz , January 3, 2024

A full 91% of U.S. publishers using a Consent Management Platform are passing consumer data to third parties before consent, Compliant reports.

This means publishers are in ‘a dangerous situation with pervasive data leakage, unlawful mass surveillance and broken consent,” says Jamie Barnard, CEO and co-founder, Compliant. 

Compliant recently looked at over one billion impressions measured across over 1,000 programmatic media campaigns. 

It also found that 82% of U.S. publishers have elevated data leakage risk through excessive vendors and unauthorized ‘piggybacked’ tags. On average, it says, U.S. publishers have five data brokers acquiring consumer data from their websites. 

Compliant concludes that most of the online advertising ecosystem is “out of sync” with such laws as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Virginia's Consumer Data Protection Act [VCDPA]). These laws require that consumers should be able to:

• Delete personal information collected from them (with some exceptions) 
• Opt-out of the sale or sharing of their personal information 
• Correct inaccurate personal information that a business has about them
• Limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information collected about them 

“Our data supports the recent findings of the ANA Programmatic Study,” Bernard continues. “There is a violent gap between what the law requires, what consumers expect and what is happening in practice. With this data, we hope industry stakeholders will take action and narrow that gap.” 

Compliant provides two indexes for advertisers, agencies and publishers:

• The Publisher Compliance Index (PCI) — measures data compliance and scores regulatory risk for individual publishers
• The Campaign Compliance Index (CCI) — measures data compliance across a brand’s entire media spend

According to Compliant, publishers can use such tools to identify their compliance risks and benchmark them against competitors.