A Mozilla research report found that big tech companies’ ad transparency tools are still poor

Efforts by tech giants to be more transparent about the ads they run are still — at best — a work in progress, according to a report looking at ad transparency tools. The report comes about half a year after the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules for larger platforms came into force, requiring companies to offer a searchable public advertising library. Companies include: Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok, and X.

In some cases, particularly (but not exclusively) Finland-based disinformation research company.

The report’s main conclusion is that the platforms’ ad monitoring tools fall short of their intended transparency and democratic accountability in a crucial year for elections globally.

“We found a lot of variation between platforms, but one thing is true across all of them: none of them offer a fully functional ad inventory and none of them offer searchers and civilians. Providing community groups with the tools and data they need to effectively monitor the impact of VLOs [very large online platforms and search engines] “On the upcoming elections in Europe,” the report’s authors wrote, describing AliExpress and X as the worst examples of tech giants who Do Providing an ad library (Amazon has avoided offering one so far), before adding a line with faint praise: “[W]I have a hard time telling you which is better.

The lack of significant data and effective tools to study platforms means that independent researchers still face huge barriers when it comes to producing data-driven insights into the impacts of big tech companies. Without robust public interest research, how can the world’s richest companies be held accountable for business models that often rely on boosting user engagement to attract more ad views?

Just think of the discussion around social media use and teen mental health, as one example. Advertising transparency tools that have enabled outside researchers to study the types of paid messages targeting youth across different platforms can help shed light on any problematic dynamics and platform incentives. But it’s clear that ad tech giants don’t make this kind of research easy.

Still, the bald truth 11 of the world’s largest technology companies providing ad repositories – most of which do so as a direct result of EU regulation – are “in themselves” an essential form of progress, argue the research’s authors. Although none of the tools they offer properly empower researchers yet in their view.

The pan-EU DSA law provides for penalties of up to 6% of global annual turnover in the event of non-compliance. So enforcing the law on poor performance could result in heavy fines in the future. But despite these heightened regulatory risks, the report suggests that tech giants are not doing enough to highlight targeted messages that drive revenue directly into their coffers.

Theater of compliance

In fact, no platform has received a “ready to go” green light rating from Mozilla and CheckFirst. Meta, which has been running an ad library for longer, has among the most mature offerings in its view, yet its ad library still has “significant gaps in data and functionality,” according to the report. Likewise, Apple, LinkedIn, and TikTok are all experiencing similar failures. Alphabet (Google), Booking.com and Pinterest were rated as having a worse “minimum” effort.

Besides the aforementioned “absolute disappointment” for AliExpress and X, the report gave the same overall red rating to Bing, Snapchat and Zalando, saying their transparency tools also lack vital data and functionality.

Compliance theater is a familiar concept to EU privacy watchdogs when it comes to designing consent flows to collect permission from web users to track and profile their online activity for targeted ads. Based on the report’s findings, something similar may be happening in platforms’ early responses to DSA requirements regarding ad transparency. Many appear to realize how little they can get away with, perhaps to test how the Commission, which oversees compliance, will respond; Or simply because they prefer to direct more of their resources to generating revenue rather than addressing legal compliance.

About a dozen tech giants that offer very large search platforms and/or engines, which the report refers to as VLOs, face the toughest level of DSA regulation – including a requirement to publish an ad library. Ad libraries tested by Mozilla and CheckFirst linked to the following e-commerce, social media and marketplace platforms between December 2023 and January 2024: AliExpress, Alphabet (Google Search and YouTube), Apple App Store, Bing, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Meta ( Facebook, Instagram), Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok,

“We consider factors such as the depth of information provided regarding the ad and the advertiser, the targeting criteria used, and the reach of the ad. In addition, we evaluate the completeness of the ad inventory, the availability of historical data, and the accessibility, consistency, and documentation of the tools provided,” the authors wrote, Also pointing out that most platforms (but not all) provide a separate website. Ad Inventory and API – and then they evaluated these separate implementations individually.

‘Big holes’

They have noticed that there have been some developments since they ran tests of their transparency tools. The study is therefore only a snapshot of where things stand about half a year after the VLOs’ late August compliance deadline.

They also did not evaluate some deeper elements, such as the accuracy of the information the platforms provide, namely about who pays for ads. Influencer or branded content is also not evaluated. But tests allow analysis of the pace of progress since compliance day, as well as enabling basic comparisons between platform offerings and deficiencies.

Among the report’s many key findings were concerns regarding accuracy issues and missing data. “HeyThey note that their accuracy testing found many instances where ads were not found in the ad inventory UI, adding: “This can limit the usefulness and merit of inventories as a transparency tool.”

“We feel that there are significant gaps between the spirit of EU regulation and these repositories in practice, which are supposed to “facilitate supervision and research into emerging risks arising from the distribution of online advertising”, noting that in the case of It only provides a CSV file for downloading, which they also found to be “strangely slow.” (They argue that this kind of historical access is “only useful if you already know everything about the ad you’re looking at,” suggesting that X, under the leadership of divisive billionaire Elon Musk, is essentially trying to obstruct independent research, even as it claims to respect the law.)

The social network formerly known as Twitter was the first platform to be officially investigated by the European Union on suspicion of violations of the Digital Services Act, including in the area of ​​data access for researchers. This investigation, which was opened in December, remains ongoing. But if DSA breaches are confirmed, X will be placed first in line to receive a hefty fine.

Also highlighting how the platforms are flouting the EU’s transparency mandate, at the time of the report, Amazon was not offering an ad library at all – having been granted a temporary exemption from the obligation by an EU court last fall.

A higher court later overturned that decision, late last month, so the e-commerce giant will have to put its promotional laundry on the line for outside viewing after all. But, as the report notes, it is all too easy for platforms to intentionally inject friction into transparency tools, whether through restrictive design, sloppy implementation, or both. This undermines researchers’ ability to interrogate the technological, social influences and business models that rely on advertising, by making it much more difficult than it should be to find, sort and filter data on the ads they have invested in.

The report contains a series of recommendations to boost transparency on platforms, including design changes that tech giants can implement, such as making ad libraries public without requiring a login; Allow unrestricted browsing; and offering improved search functionality such as supporting searches by keyword, advertiser, country, and date range and allowing results to be filtered and sorted, to name a few of the proposed changes.

They also suggest steps for implementers, such as developing advertising transparency guidelines that set minimum standards for what platforms must offer in web repositories and APIs; It requires the use of standardized APIs to access research to enhance ease of use and enable cross-platform research.