Online Exploitation: Drawing the Line for Surveillance Advertising in Europe
本文梳理欧盟近二十年限制监控广告的法律进展，包括GDPR、DSA、DMA和AI法案，并呼吁广告伦理与实证研究协同政策制定者，明确可接受的数字广告实践，提出理解在线剥削的理论框架。
The law shapes advertising. It informs businesses and advertising research about the boundaries of exploring with ads. The European Union (EU) has actively restricted surveillance-based digital advertising in the past two decades. In addition to traditional consumer protection and competition law rules, the EU has introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), all of which offer enhanced protections for consumers in the digital markets. The EU Commission is now considering introducing the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) and, potentially, a digital advertising-specific regulation to ensure surveillance advertising practices do not exploit consumers and are otherwise fair. While the EU draws the lines on consumer autonomy, there is limited conceptual clarity on when digital advertising practices precisely cross those lines. At this crucial time for digital advertising, advertising ethics and evidence-based advertising research must join the policymakers to clarify acceptable digital advertising practices. This paper informs advertising research about the legal developments in the EU to call for creating coherence across disciplines. It contributes to such coherence by offering a working theoretical framework for understanding online exploitation in the context of surveillance advertising.