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 our primary interest). However, project served as a reminder that we lack universal technical standards for ad transparency, a problem we are trying to solve here.
The main purpose is that, with ad transparency firmly on the agenda of the EU's Digital Services Act and Democracy Action Plan, the absence of a technical standard creates a lot of unnecessary wiggle room and uncertainty about what data will be in - and out - of scope. The benefit of a single industry standard for ad transparency is obvious - it improves the quality of data available to internet users and for research while reducing the burden on advertising platforms to produce their own formats and data outputs.
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.
- This is part of our "Open Political Ad Library" work.
- 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 first iteration (alpha) and can therefore be substantially improved.
- If you have suggestions, please make them here, or email us.