National Consumer Secretariat establishes transparency and data quality criteria for digital platforms

SENACON’s recent Technical Note established transparency criteria applicable to platforms, mentioning the need to comply with dignity, health, safety, protection and harmony within consumer relations.The Technical Note does not define the term “digital platforms”, but lists requirements to be met and observed by them, in order to ensure greater transparency and access to data and ads provided to consumers. 95 requirements are listed, divided into (i) Criteria for Access to and Quality of Data on Advertisements and (ii) Criteria for Access to and Quality of Data.

The Technical Note specifies that both criteria are formulated with the aim of evaluating “the mechanisms for accessing research data made available by the main social media platforms operating in Brazil“. Thus, the platforms would have to meet and comply with transparency criteria to enable access to such data.

Among the criteria stipulated by the Technical Note for greater transparency for consumers on “digital platforms” are:

a) The need to provide an Application Programming Interface (“API”) to enable access to and collection of up-to-date data on all types of ads made on the platform in the last year;

b) The obligation to offer updated data via API on the content of all ads, such as texts and links to media, and updated data on the geographic location of the audience reached;

c) The duty to make available via API up-to-date and relevant data on advertisers who have served ads on the platform and on who has paid for the boosting of ads served;

d) The need to clearly and unequivocally signal content produced by Artificial Intelligence via API;

e) The duty of the platform’s ad repository API to signal if an ad has been deleted, indicating the reason and date of removal;

f) The provision of an interface to the platform’s or network’s ad repository that provides up-to-date data on the age and gender of the audience reached by ads aired in the last year;

g) The retrieval of data from public publications made by a specific author by means of their username or unique identifier, at least for researchers;

h) The API must provide all the data necessary to understand the complete lifecycle of a specific publication, including comments, shares, replies and other possible relationships, as well as its authors and the content it refers to; and

i) Presentation of grouped information on the volume and type of violations identified during the application of governance and moderation policies in Brazil, such as the dissemination of illegal content, hate speech and false information.

The Technical Note specifies that platforms will have a period of 4 (four) months to adapt to the Ads Data Quality Criteria and 12 (twelve) months for the Data Quality Criteria.