That's according to research out Tuesday from Mozilla and CheckFirst, which concludes that leading tech platforms are lagging in their ad transparency tools. None of the results were great, and some were "a major disappointment," according to the researchers. "This is now no longer something that's voluntary," Claire Pershan, EU advocacy lead at Mozilla, told CNBC. It's troubling news as the major platforms prepare for a huge year of elections that affect upward of 4 billion people in more than 40 countries. Lesplingart told CNBC that users had to know the advertiser name, targeted country and date of the advertisement in order to export to an ad file.

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Persons: Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Bing, Claire Pershan, Amaury Lesplingart, CheckFirst, Josh Becker, Lesplingart, Bing, Alibaba's, Zalando, Booking.com, TikTok, it's, we'd Organizations: Inc, Government, Society, Mozilla, Google, LinkedIn, Union's Digital Services, CNBC, Democratic, X, European Commission, DSA, Meta, YouTube Locations: Stanford , California, U.S, Meta, California