The EBU says its concerned provisions in European ePrivacy regulations could restrict the role of third parties that gather audience measurement data on behalf of broadcasters.
It says if the current draft were to go through it would hamper European media organizations’ capacity to innovate and improve their digital services.
Typically, broadcasters will sub contract their audience research to third parties. Often this goes hand in hand with developing a single standard across multiple broadcasters.
It’s calling on the European Parliament to ensure that the ePrivacy Regulation’s exception on audience measurement (under Art. 8 (1)(d)) is extended to contractual third parties gathering data on behalf of media organizations.
EBU Head of European Affairs Nicola Frank said: “Public Service Media organisations strive to gather data in the most transparent, secure and accountable manner in order to provide the most relevant experience as well as offer the possibility to discover new content. This is why we need a fully-functional data protection framework at EU level which caters for strong end-user privacy and technological feasibility.”
The EBU is also concerned that by giving control of users privacy settings to the web browsers, broadcasters’ needs to get individual permissions would be eroded.
