Last  week the UK data privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), announced a consultation [ICO call for views on our approach to regulating online advertising | ICO] on its approach to the enforcement of consent requirements under regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) [The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003] trailing potential changes to remove the need for individual consent for some forms of online advertising to support innovation in the adtech space.

Currently advertisers making use of online adtech are required to secure informed consent from individual users as doing so involves the storage of, or access to, information on an individual’s device. The reality is that many in the media space either do not obtain such consent before deploying tracking technologies that are frequently used in ad tech. The reason being that doing so is, from a practical point of view, very difficult. Thankfully, – the ICO is now considering changes which could include the removal of this need for consent where any use of adtech presents a low risk to the privacy of an individual.

The ICO has made clear that there will always be circumstances in which the use of adtech will require individual user consent; such as for behavioural advertising involving extensive profiling of online activity, habits and behaviours, potentially across different services and devices. However, the ICO is considering whether there are other ways to deliver online advertising that do not involve such significant and detailed processing of data which could justify removing the need for consent whilst still safeguarding individual privacy.

As part of its consultation the ICO will focus on six key areas: (1) ad delivery and billing; (2) ad fraud prevention and detection; (3) brand safety, brand suitability and brand compliance; (4) frequency capping; (5) measurement and attribution; and targeting (i.e. how an advert is targeted towards a user or group of users).

Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback on this consultation via the ICO’s online portal with a deadline of 29 August 2025: Our approach to regulating online advertising – Call for views – Information Commissioner’s Office – Citizen Space. In addition, the ICO has announced that it plans to run a number of in-person technical workshops with participants from across the online advertising industry alongside meetings with trade associations and other representatives from across the sector.

This consultation gives providers and users of adtech in the UK an important opportunity to influence future regulation which may in turn drive innovation in the sector. Media agencies, publishers, tech partners, data aggregators, advertisers and frankly anyone connected with advertising should take this crucial opportunity to inform the regulator of their views. Implementation of the GDPR is widely regarded as a missed opportunity for industry’s concerns to be voiced and heard, this is a rare opportunity to try to fix the rules in this space.