Event-Driven Compliance: Reconciling Privacy Regulation with Real-Time Advertising Infrastructure

Abstract

Programmatic advertising ecosystem functions based on distributed, event-driven frameworks that handle user data across enterprise limits in milliseconds, with basic contradictions with the present-day privacy laws such as GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and CCPA/CPRA. The system of real-time bidding projects the identifiers of users and the cues of their behavior to many prospective advertisers, creating compliance risks that are multiplicative beyond jurisdictional lines. This manuscript formalizes six compliance properties—Per-event Consent Conformance, Purpose Binding and Minimization, Revocation Timeliness, Provenance and Auditability, Limited Linkability, and Privacy Quantification—that enable systematic evaluation of technical solutions. Architectural patterns, including consent-as-event signaling, edge gating, tokenization with ephemeral identifiers, server-side aggregation with differential privacy, and tamper-evident provenance logging, address these requirements. Prototype evaluation demonstrates that privacy-preserving enforcement mechanisms can coexist with real-time programmatic advertising, introducing a latency overhead of 2-8 milliseconds for consent verification and tokenization while maintaining differential privacy guarantees with epsilon values between 1.0 and 2.0. Privacy mechanisms reduce re-identification risk below threshold levels while introducing manageable utility degradation of 8-15% in conversion attribution accuracy. Implementation requires coordinated standardization across consent encoding semantics, provenance metadata schemas, differential privacy parameters, and cross-jurisdictional adaptability. The fundamental tension between fine-grained targeting economics and regulatory pressure toward minimization remains politically and economically contested, requiring alignment of technical capabilities with legal obligations and user expectations through governance structures and competitive oversight.