Browsing by Subject "Digital Service Act (DSA)"

The fast development of technology encourages online platforms to advance in online targeted advertising, which raises concerns for regulation in this field, particularly regarding their transparency and accountability. To address these concerns, in 2022 the European Union introduced a new piece of legislation, the Digital Service Act (the DSA), which focuses on transparency and accountability of online platforms and aims to bridge information asymmetry between intermediaries and service recipients. The current thesis offers a descriptive analysis of the regulatory framework and examines transparency requirements for online platforms in online targeted advertising under Articles 26, 27, and 39 of the DSA, particularly how effectively these provisions contribute to transparency and bridging information asymmetry between service recipients and online platforms. The scope of this research relates to online platforms and how the DSA regulates online targeted advertising. The DSA enables greater access to information for service recipients by requiring disclosure of key parameters, advertisers’ information, inclusion and exclusion criteria used by online platforms based on which online targeted advertising is provided. Furthermore, the DSA prohibits the profiling of special categories of personal data and sets strict rules for very large online platforms (VLOPS) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs), requiring to maintain public repositories for their advertising activities. While the DSA aims to transform the information landscape, it has potential issues regarding information asymmetry between online platforms and service recipients. The findings indicate that the DSA mostly addresses transparency through disclosure requirements understandable for the average service recipient. The potential issues can be observed towards clarity and comprehensibility of the provided information and disclosure information based on the needs of individual service recipients, which overall does not contribute to bridging information asymmetry between online platforms and service recipients. The questions further emerge from the fact that information required is not always easily accessible and interpretable, with possible ambiguity, for example, towards “prominent marking”, “main parameters”, disclosing who presents and pays for ads, revealing the functionality of recommender systems and algorithms utilized in online targeted advertising. Moreover, possible complications can be seen with the accessibility of datasets in public repositories, and constraints of transparency in the operations of VLOSEs in online targeted advertising. The aforementioned issues limit the achievement of the transparency goal outlined in the DSA and create obstacles in bridging information asymmetry between online platforms and service recipients.