Apple’s compliance with the mandate of European law regarding data privacy regulation and transparency of political advertising has been investigated by Mozilla. The bill is designed to pepper acts of election rigging by foreign powers and give citizens the information tools they need to elect an informed leader.
While neither of the failing grades is on Facebook (the social network) it is nothing less than worrying, considering the potential that these ads will result in misinterpretations that could jeopardize democracy.
Under the new EU law, places that sell ads, including Apple, may be obliged to carefully label political ads, disclose who financed them, and report data on which ads are specifically targeted. Are. This enables them to understand what they should care about online message-wise rather than believing any disinformation. Not only this, but this law takes away the opportunity for foreign governments to run political advertisements even during election periods.
The privacy disclosures of 14 different tech companies like Apple have been analyzed by Mozilla and CheckFirst. This discovery would herald the existence of an extremely serious failure of Apple’s transparency mechanisms. The way I evaluated political ads on the App Store was not intuitive because I had to make a lot of effort to use the limited search engine and the information system was not clear.
Such a vague way of communicating political information leaves voters confused about what is true and what is not. Think about the situation when you see an advertisement saying that climate change is a fabrication – surely you would want to know the truth after seeing that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for it.
Absent a press, robots in the field of political advertising transparency could disrupt the information cycle and party systems of European democracies. Thus, the ball is in Apple’s court to step up and close these transparency gaps in the implementation of EU rules, to maintain a healthy political discussion online.
