Court Upholds Verdict Adtech TCF for RTB Is Illegal Under GDPR

Back in 2022 the Belgian and other data protection boards found that IAB’s ‘Transparency and Consent Framework‘ is illegal, because it is neither transparent nor has any meaningful connection with the word consent. IAB is the industry club for adtech users. Yesterday this verdict was upheld on appeal.

You know the kind of consent form from about 80% of websites, it takes one click to give away everything for the next three generations, and a day of clicks to deny consent. They need to coerce your consent to feed the tracking based real-time-bidding mechanisms for displaying all those ads that you see if you don’t use an ad blocker like a sane adult.

It was always clear that type of behaviour does not result in freely given consent for tracking and is illegal under the GDPR. But it takes time to have such things contested in court and affirmed before adtech corporations will admit it.

The 2022 decision now upheld on appeal (PDF in Dutch) applies immediately across the EU, and will impact such IAB members as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, and Automattic (WordPress) (at least they were a member back in 2022). The appeal to the decision was filed in March 2022, and the Belgian court submitted several prejudicial questions to the European court of justice, that were answered in spring 2024, and now lead to a decision.

Excellent work by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and others.

Ceterum censeo AdTech is fundamentally non-compatible with the GDPR, and needs to die.