What Ad Ops Teams Need to Know About Privacy Now

Jessica Lee, Loeb’s chief privacy & security partner and chair of the firm’s Privacy, Security & Data Innovations practice, is featured in an AdMonsters Q&A article discussing how evolving state privacy laws, age-gating challenges, downstream vendor liability, consent frameworks, artificial intelligence tools and heightened regulatory scrutiny are reshaping the landscape for ad operations (AdOps) teams.

In the article, when asked about whether practices like ad measurement, frequency capping and cross-device deduplication qualify as “strictly necessary,” Jessica explained that the definition is still unsettled, with the term more often applied to sensitive data and nonsensitive uses guided by purpose limitation and data minimization.

“‘Strictly necessary’ language typically comes into play when we’re talking about sensitive data,” Jessica said. “For nonsensitive data, the laws rely more on purpose limitation and data minimization concepts; essentially, the idea that data should only be used for what it was collected for or what’s required to deliver the service.”

Jessica also pointed out that new state laws expanding protections for teens are pushing publishers to rethink how they handle age data, with probabilistic modeling emerging as a potential solution.

“A lot of publishers don’t collect age data by default, so using inference models could actually reduce the need for more intrusive data collection,” she noted. “It’s not without controversy, even among kids’ advocates, but I do think probabilistic age gating is going to be one solution we see more of in the future.”

In discussing publisher liability when downstream vendors fail to honor consent signals, Jessica noted that while safe harbors exist, regulators increasingly expect reasonable oversight.

“It’s not about verifying every partner in the chain, but publishers should be able to demonstrate they’ve taken reasonable steps to assess compliance and mitigate risk,” she added.

To read the full article, please visit AdMonsters’ website.