What's Utiq? or: EU internet providers and marketers adtech powergrab

[tcecyk]

having seen utiq integration today in an App webview while debugging, I thought this should get a search hit after following them for a while:

Utiq (ex TrustPid) is a european telco initiative to get a slice from the advertising real-time bidding markets (Google mostly) and for marketers in identifier aggregation and retargeting to survive strict cookies. They build their technology on creating pseudonymous identifiers from your internet connection. You’ll find utiq is partnered with major media publishers advertising agencies.

Being a telco joint venture (Vodafone, Orange, Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom) it comes at no surprise they include broadband now for signaling after being mobile-only before. See this table if your provider participates:

[table] telco providers participating for mobile phone and broadband

utiq says it has explicit and centralized consent management, but we all know consent dialogs are quickly clicked past and forgotten forever. I take especially issue with using the uplink as method for identifier creation and self serving opt-out validity (1 yr). Consent dialogs (or “hubs”) are fig leafs and the technology once deployed and widely adopted easily misused down the line.

The powergrab is all good for GDP and telco shareholders, but I disagree that we as industrious societies need targeted advertising at all, it’s rather a weakness in mass communication being able to be targeted in a cohort. That said, the population by a majority likes Apps and things online to be “free” and thus the supply side looks at other income streams.

According to studies mid 2024, adoption on major sites is still low: A first look into Utiq: Next-generation cookies at the ISP level

Netzpolitik has written about it at length in german, here’s the most recent writing in 2025 linking to older research: Utiq: Tracking jetzt auch am Internetanschluss zu Hause

[nanabanaman]

I came across this recently, too, in the TOS of Vodafone Germany, as well when someone sent me a link to a very popular tabloid website RTL news.

To put this in non-technical terms for everyone:

You click on “Accept” on a cookie policy consent popup on ONE website you visit, and now your internet provider sends information about ALL the websites you visit to a data collection company called Utiq and they can do with that information whatever they please.

The opt-out also doesn’t seem to work if you use any form of ad- and cookie blocker, though I couldn’t get it to work with everything disabled either.

I am of the opinion that this practice falls under § 305c of the German BGB, which states that surprising clauses are not considered valid parts of TOS. Consequently, Utiq and the telcos are guilty of virtually every privacy crime we have a law for.