Association for Computing Machinery
Digital platforms provide a deregulated and opaque environment suited to the maintenance of their business model, in which ads are efficiently served by opaque algorithms to meticulously profiled users based on their behavioral data. The advertising infrastructure provided by these platforms made advertising more segmented and scalable, creating new opportunities and allowing for a profit-oriented influence industry to develop worldwide. Some platforms have invested in transparency measures for digital advertising, but there is still a gap between what is applied in the Global South and the Global North. In Brazil, despite evidence of an online ecosystem of suspicious, inauthentic, scam, and other types of fraudulent ads, regulatory proposals have faced a hard opposition from tech companies. Against this backdrop, there is a need to evaluate advertising transparency archives currently offered by online platforms in Brazil as a means to measure the quality of libraries and the available data.
Thus, the main objective of this work is to account for transparency measures and means of accessing data of some of the largest online platforms and search engines in the country, in order to establish a general comparative diagnosis of ad transparency in Brazil. Based on the platforms’ public documentation, policies and terms of use for the Brazilian market, we perform a comparative analysis of six companies: Meta, Google, Twitter/X, Telegram, TikTok, and Spotify. Particular consideration is given to whether these companies do or do not have ads repositories, or a means to assess the disseminated advertisements. In an environment of low transparency and difficulty in accessing data, we found that the Meta Ad Library, although providing very limited data, is the most reliable source for systematic investigations of the digital advertising ecosystem. Even though Google offers an advertisement repository in Brazil, it lags considerably behind that offered by Meta and imposes greater difficulty in carrying out systematic analyses. On the other hand, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Spotify do not present any advertising repository or transparency center in order to analyse the Brazilian scenario. Although the scenario in the Global South can be characterized by a lack of transparency from platforms and by difficulties in accessing data, recent measures implemented elsewhere have demonstrated that this condition is reversible.
How to cite: Rose Marie Santini, Débora Salles, Bruno Maurício Martins, Alékis Moreira, and João Gabriel Haddad. 2024. Seeing through opacity: The limitations of digital ad transparency in Brazil. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2209–2221.
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