The Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, announced, on Tuesday 2 November, in the framework of the Web Summit in Lisbon, the presentation of a future legislative proposal concerning online political advertising. The text should be presented in “a few weeks”, she said.
The Commission’s proposal is expected to focus on several issues, starting with shared sensitive data. These “should not be used to target for political purposes”, Ms Jourová said.
In addition, the focus should also be on transparency. “Either you are able to explain publicly what you are doing, who you are targeting and how, or you should not”, the European Commission Vice-President insisted.
Lastly, she added that this future text must cover “the whole chain of production of an advertisement”, thus including companies like Cambridge Analytica, and not only the major digital players like Facebook or Google.
This future proposal would thus be in line with the major dossiers of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act (see EUROPE 12820/5), on which work is continuing both in the European Parliament (see EUROPE 12821/8) and in the EU Council (see EUROPE 12823/10).
In addition to targeting, political advertising and online disinformation, Věra Jourová also used the Web Summit to come back on the growing influence of technology giants and the need to control algorithms.
“The big technology companies have great power, but they have not taken responsibility. As regulators, we need to do two things: make companies more responsible and accountable and empower users so that they have more control over their digital experience”, she said. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)