In 2025, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will focus on three major privacy goals. One of the top concerns is online tracking. The other two are protecting children’s privacy and updating rules about AI and automated decision-making.
Florence Greatrix, who leads the ICO’s policy for online tracking, said at a privacy event in New York that 2025 is a very important year for online tracking. This means advertisers, publishers, and ad tech companies must take compliance seriously, especially when it comes to getting proper user consent.
Why Control Matters to Users
According to the ICO’s research, people like personalized ads because they enjoy the free services they get in return. However, many users feel they lack control. They often don’t know why they see certain ads or how their data is used. Florence Greatrix said, “People want control and choice, and the law gives them that right.”
What is ‘Meaningful Choice’?
Giving users a choice is not enough if they cannot act on it properly. This is where many websites fail. Some don’t allow users to reject non-essential tracking. Others ignore opt-outs and keep tracking users anyway. In many cases, users can’t even withdraw their consent easily.
Greatrix made it clear that fixing these consent problems is one of the ICO’s main goals for 2025. The ICO wants every user to have a real and meaningful choice when it comes to online tracking.
PETs Can Help, But They Are Not the Only Solution
Tony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, agrees that balancing privacy and ad targeting is hard. But he believes Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) can help. The IAB Tech Lab has created guidelines and tools to make ads more privacy-friendly. These include seller-defined audiences, PAIR, data clean rooms, and ID-less solutions.
Now, the Tech Lab wants to go beyond theory. It will start live testing PETs in a new Privacy Lab, where companies can experiment with methods like differential privacy, secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption.
This Privacy Lab will also include an open-source trusted server for programmatic ads.
However, Greatrix warned that PETs are not magic. “They won’t fix everything overnight,” she said. “But they will help you build privacy-friendly systems by design.”
