Seeing through opacity: The limitations of digital ad transparency in Brazil

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.