IAB Tech Lab Lays Out New Standards Despite Looming Questions From Google

Less than a week after Google’s latest privacy bombshell, the IAB Tech Lab, a nonprofit focusing on solutions for brand safety and ad fraud, is releasing new foundational standards around digital ad targeting for public comment. The release of new specifications to establish best practices around using online identifiers and managing consumer privacy comes a year into the Tech Lab’s Project Rearc, an operation to find a suitable alternative to third-party cookies, trackers Google Chrome will stop supporting in early 2022. Last week, Google doubled-down on its privacy push announcing it won’t build or support alternatives to third-party cookies within its ad stack, solely relying on its Privacy Sandbox instead. The shock of the announcement has left industry bodies such as the Tech Lab and the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM), which are now working together to build new ad targeting standards, searching for answers. Dennis Buchheim, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said Google’s latest announcement has been “disruptive in good ways and bad ways,” adding that the Tech Lab and Google’s latest releases are both “very much privacy focused.” “There's clarity we're seeking there from Google, and everybody is seeking from Google, because their announcement did not exactly paint the end-to-end picture of how everything would work,” Buchheim said. The Tech Lab today has released four new specs that aim to bring more accountability and standardization to the drastically changing online identity and ad targeting practices. The comment period for the Global Privacy Platform ends on April 8, while the comment period for the other proposals ends May 7. Accountability Platform: To standardize consistent auditing, it defines what data can be captured and logged from the supply chain in order to ensure stakeholders are adhering to user privacy preferences.Global Privacy Platform: Building on compliancy frameworks for GDPR and CCPA, it establishes a consistent approach to managing privacy signals from consumers and publishers across regions and locales.Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens: Establishes guidelines around security and consumer privacy for content and services tied to identifiers based on email addresses or phone numbers provided by consumers.Taxonomy and Data Transparency Standards to Support Seller-Defined Audience and Context Signaling: Creating standard definitions for audience and contextual segments that can be passed within OpenRTB when no user-provided or third-party identifier is available. Buchheim said the releases that don’t mention the need for identifiers should not be affected by Google’s latest announcement, leaving only the spec around identity tokens in possible jeopardy. “The ID piece is the one that is more in question,” he said. Google is a member of the IAB Tech Lab. Buchheim said the group doesn’t always “get as much heads-up as we might ideally like.” But after an internal meeting to discuss Google’s privacy update, the Tech Lab felt its releases were still valid. "The release of these specifications and best practices marks an important milestone in PRAM and Tech Lab's efforts to lay the foundation for the next generation of addressable media, and it validates Tech Lab's vital role in leading this complex technical work for PRAM," Bill Tucker, executive director of PRAM, said in a statement. "Over recent weeks, PRAM has moved aggressively into the implementation phase of its work with announcements around our code submission process, release of business use cases, and invitation to Google to engage directly with the industry on the future of ID standards. Jerry Dischler, vp and general manager of Google Ads, said today during the IAB’s virtual annual leadership meeting that Google is now formally working together with PRAM on the Privacy Sandbox. 3 Publishers on Data Regulation, Cookie Blocking & the New Age of Consumer Privacy