Privacy Regulations Will Expose Fraudulent Data, Says MadHive's Adam Helfgott

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Privacy—it’s a huge, thorny issue that affects nearly every aspect of modern life. So huge that the state of California is taking extraordinary steps to ensure the safety of consumer data, with the California Consumer Privacy Act. Europe's GDPR has been in effect for years, now, and more regulations are doubtless on the way.

Adam Helfgott, CEO of MadHive, sees an interesting consequence of these regulations: “It'll start exposing a lot of the fraudulent data that exists in the space because they'll have to start proving the provenance of it,” he tells TVREV.

That provenance, in the case of fraudulent data, simply won’t be there.

Exposing this kind of fraud is crucial for the ad industry, and in particular for OTT players. MadHive research found that 20% of streaming video ad requests are fraudulent, and that’s the kind of number that will keep any ad exec up at night.

But there are steps that can be taken to minimize the effects of this fraud. Watch Helfgott’s full answer to our question of how privacy regulations will affect consumer data:

Here’s a transcript of Helfgott’s answer:

It'll start exposing a lot of the fraudulent data that exists in the space because they'll have to start proving the provenance of it. The provenance won't be very much there. So I think we'll start seeing the rise of a lot more like machine learned, data segments and things like that. A lot of stuff that we're focused on: using attribution to basically defined data segments and not really care about the individual at all and kind of reverse engineer everything.