One of the most ubiquitous pieces of ad tech is under the scrutiny of federal regulators.
The FTC recently published a deep dive into pixels and their potential risks to consumers, noting that “companies using tracking pixels that impermissibly disclose an individual’s personal information (which may include health information) to third parties” may be in violation of a host of state and federal laws.
The explainer came after the regulatory body slapped fines on discount drug provider GoodRx in February and digital therapy firm BetterHelp earlier this month, for $1.5 million and $7.8 million respectively, both for sharing sensitive customer information with third parties like Google and Meta via pixels.
Cookies are usually at the center of conversations about the nefarious impacts of digital advertising on privacy. Pixels are often lumped with other ills of social platforms. But pixels are broader and more fundamental to digital advertising functions than cookies: pixels are a common process by which websites allow cross-site tracking, while identifiers like cookies, IP addresses and email addresses help brands tag the customers they encounter across the web.
“They’re not new. They’re not limited to Meta,” said Alex Cone, co-founder of ads privacy learning platform Coir. “It is such a common implementation of collecting data that nearly every ad-tech company [incorporates pixels].”
And despite the enforcement actions, advertisers aren’t abandoning them any time soon: three ad buyers told Adweek that their clients could not successfully advertise without pixels. As advertisers have lost access to many of the other tools they once relied on for targeting and attribution, access to pixels, which exist on thousands of the most-trafficked websites, has been a lifeline for marketers adapting to a new digital advertising ecosystem.
“Pixels are a necessity,” said Ivonnie Dulce, senior director of paid social at agency Dysrupt. “It is something within our checklist that we always have to set up before we launch any campaign.”
Previously positioned as benign
Pixels are web requests that a user’s browser makes for the purpose of tracking, according to Irene Knapp, a former Google engineer now working with tech privacy watchdog Tech Inquiry. They started as tiny transparent images appended to websites, though now they are embedded into HTML and JavaScript online and in emails in less noticeable ways.