In his presentation, the ICO’s McDougall said the data protection authority’s look into the ad tech sector so far had confirmed some direct processing by vendors of special category data — such as ethnicity or data on someone’s health or sex life — without explicit consent, a violation of GDPR. As for user consent, the ICO said it found inadequate and — in some cases — inaccurate transparency information was made available. It discovered privacy policies that lacked clarity or provided conflicting information. It was sometimes unclear how users would withdraw consent. The ICO said it had also found a poor standard of companies assessing they have a “legitimate interest” for their collection and retention of data.

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