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EU advertising consent after Brussels Market Court: alternative to IAB Europe’s TCF, disputes on GDPR controllership and TC strings, and prospects for reforming real-time bidding

Published on: 27 August 2025

Published by an LexisNexis EU Law expert
Legal News
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Article summary

How can websites best preserve privacy in tracking users’ consent to targeted online advertising?

A landmark Belgian court decision has triggered a rethink of how sites safeguard privacy while logging consent for targeted ads. Spurred by the Brussels Market Court’s May 2025 ruling against adtech trade body IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) — a consent tool broadly deployed across the EU (see here) — German university professor Max von Grafenstein, founder of legal tech venture Law & Innovation Technology, is designing a fresh mechanism to record and relay consent throughout the ad ecosystem.

The IAB proceedings are under close observation because they grapple with fundamental questions about the boundaries of personal data and the identification of controllers. Hundreds of websites and advertisers depend on the TCF to satisfy EU data protection requirements when seeking permission to deliver personalised advertising. That compliance underlies real-time bidding, enabling advertisers to procure slots for targeted placements. The Belgian court was hearing an appeal of the Belgian Data Protection Authority’s view that IAB Europe’s ‘transparency and consent strings’ amount to personal data under Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ...

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