April 24, 2024 at 03:41AM
A security firm has found that at least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US are sending visitor data to various advertising brokers, including a Chinese company with past privacy controversies. The report raises concerns about compliance with ad rules and online privacy, especially as .gov websites are not supposed to run ads in the US.
Based on the meeting notes, it seems that there are concerns about public sector websites in the UK and US sending visitor data to web advertising brokers, including a Chinese ad-tech company with past privacy controversies. The report from Silent Push raises concerns about compliance with rules limiting ads on government websites and online privacy. The issue seems to revolve around the use of ads.txt files that allow various advertising exchanges and resellers to sell ad space inventory on behalf of the government websites.
There is particular attention on the use of Yeahmobi, a Chinese ad-tech vendor, by the .gov.uk sites, which reportedly had its mobile ad SDK removed from the Google Play Store in 2018 for alleged ad fraud. The concern is that these advertising brokers may have access to data associated with website visitors, such as their IP addresses and other identifiers, which may not align with visitors’ expectations when accessing public-sector websites. Additionally, there are implications that some of these practices may violate US government CISA rules.
The report also points out that while the .gov.uk websites have measures in place to mitigate advertising fraud such as app-ads.txt and sellers.json files, there are still concerns about the sharing of user data with ad exchange partners and the subsequent bidding process for ad space.
Overall, the meeting notes highlight a need for stronger policies to explicitly ban ads on government websites and alleviate concerns about the uncontrolled nature of ad tech and user data mining and monetization.
Please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like me to address or if there are specific action items resulting from these meeting notes.