This is a modified version of Google's "Ad Transparency Spotlight" documentation. Their proposal is inadequate to cover many of the elements and areas needed to provide true transparency, particularly for political ads (which is the primary interest of Who Targets Me). However, their project served as a reminder that we lack universal technical standards for ad transparency, a problem we are trying to solve with this proposal.
The absence of a common technical standard creates a lot of unnecessary wiggle room and uncertainty about what data will be in - and out - of scope in any transparency regulation. The benefit of a single industry-wide standard for ad transparency is obvious - it improves the quality of data available to internet users, journalists and researcher while reducing the burden on advertising providers to devise and produce their own formats and data outputs. This is particularly valuable for smaller providers.
To create:
- A technical, machine-readable standard for advertising transparency to be used by any advertising platform.
- A means for people to build tools that add context and explanation to the ads people see.
- A universal format, with sufficient flexibility, to allow data from multiple platforms to be combined and compared.
- These documents were created by Who Targets Me.
- Our start point was to combine Google's schema, which we saw as something of a start point, with our own "Gold Standard" for political ad transparency.
- This is a proposal, so suggestions and improvements are welcome.
- If you have suggestions, please make them here, or email us.