AI is aggressively cannibalizing open web traffic and speeding up the collapse of monetization faster than anyone predicted.
Yes, everyone is now chasing the spend shift into CTV and in-app, but here’s the dangerous truth: we’re walking into security and privacy chaos with our eyes closed. The speed of this AI-driven pivot—with campaigns running at warp speed—is creating new, severe regulatory pressure. The old way of thinking about risk is officially dead.
Legacy Security Tools Are Obsolete: AI Is Gutting the Open Web
For a decade, we built meticulous verification tools to police the desktop web. They worked perfectly. But in the new AI reality, those systems are obsolete.
The core issue is deeper than AI creating efficiency and pushing media budgets toward less-transparent inventory, like in-app and CTV. The problem is that in these fragmented, opaque ecosystems, the bedrock assumption of safety no longer holds up. You simply cannot verify core factors like traffic sourcing, inventory quality or ad behavior using legacy systems.
Programmatic buying, now turbo-charged by AI’s breakneck efficiency, has completely outpaced our existing security infrastructure. This is creating fraud and risk threats that are far greater and much harder to detect than anything we have ever encountered on the open web. If the industry doesn’t immediately resolve this security disparity, the very efficiency AI provides will quickly become its single greatest liability.
In-App Is the New Regulatory Frontier: The Mid-2026 Mandate
Regulators tend to follow the money, and right now, the money is sprinting to in-app.
They used to be fixated on the cookie, but while ad tech’s eyes were glued to deprecation timelines, regulators were circling in-app. They see it as the next major, massive vulnerability for consumer data and security.
Think about the environment: In-app experiences aggressively scoop up mobile-specific data—device IDs, location information—often with significantly less user transparency than even the most basic website pop-up. That inherent opacity, coupled with the existing security blind spots, creates a perfect setup for legislative action.
Here’s my prediction: By mid-2026, we will face dedicated, forceful mandates for in-app ad security and data protection—a shift comparable to the disruptive impact of GDPR, but focused on mobile. This will undoubtedly catch most platforms unprepared. We can no longer afford a narrow, web-centric view of regulation. We have to proactively establish security and data standards for the in-app world now, before an expensive and disruptive regulatory fiat is forced upon us.
Compliance Can’t Be a Quarterly Check-Box. It Must Be Always-On
AI optimization has increased campaign velocity so much that the margin for human error is essentially zero. In a world where media buying is executed in milliseconds and algorithms constantly fine-tune campaigns, a quarterly—or even monthly—privacy compliance audit model is simply dead. A compliance slip-up now can be instantly magnified across thousands of transactions.
The shift must be from a reactive, periodic model to a continuous, automated monitoring one. Privacy compliance cannot be a check-box handled by one team every few months; it has to be an always-on layer integrated directly into the ad delivery process. This means using AI and machine learning not just to buy media, but also to continuously check that campaigns adhere to all relevant privacy and security mandates as they execute.
This is a massive operational challenge, but it’s also a huge opportunity. The platforms that bake automated, real-time compliance into their core will not only de-risk their media spend but will also gain a huge competitive advantage by showing consumers and regulators that trust is built in.
The Time for Proactive Defense is Now
The dynamics of the advertising world are fundamentally changing. We need to look past the distraction of cookie deprecation and concentrate intensely on securing and mastering the highly complex, critical security and privacy environment within in-app and CTV advertising.
While the magnitude of this challenge is vast, it presents a clear opportunity for industry leadership to actively shape an advertising ecosystem that is more secure, compliant and enduring. We are no longer focused on reacting to past problems. It is time to transition to a proactive defense that prepares us for the future. The moment for action is now.