IAB Tech Lab Is Building a Universal Framework for Domestic and Global Privacy Laws

Faced with the complexities of numerous privacy laws and associated compliance costs, the IAB Tech Lab is devising a single comprehensive solution to streamline privacy consent and people's choice signals or the permission to use data from sites and apps to ad-tech providers. A product of the Project Rearc initiative, the IAB Tech Lab announced today the launch of its Global Privacy Platform (GPP) for advertisers, publishers and technology vendors. It will implement GDPR, PIPEDA and the U.S. state-centric privacy laws where the GPP creates an environment for publishers to tell people what data is collected and how the website and its company partners intend to use it. This will be carried through a single codified string for all partners in the supply chain to decode. The GPP comes at a time when the ad industry has invested millions to keep up with domestic and global laws. With other states in the U.S. pushing privacy laws—Connecticut being the most recent—compliance costs and processes have gotten more complex given the minor yet important discrepancies between each state. The idea is to lower the cost of operating and relay privacy signals across systems through a framework that consists of all information around user data while making it simpler for content management platforms (CMP) to operate. For example, if a California resident sitting in Connecticut accesses a website, the CCPA and Connecticut laws apply to the person, both appearing in a single consent box instead of “multiple frameworks, passing multiple strings and fragmenting the whole transaction,” which otherwise makes the process more complex and costly, said Shailley Singh, IAB Tech Lab’s svp of product. Currently, to get user consent, each privacy law requires its own interface, different ways of communicating user data and multiple ways to channel that information, which adds to the cost each time a new law comes forth. With an inclusive consent interface that collects all data and communicates through a single channel, the cost is alleviated. Cost-efficient solution GPP is a product of IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc, a project focused on building privacy-enhancing technologies. This initiative integrates with existing privacy signals from Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework and CCPA. Through a consent interface and output channel, advertisers and publishers can benefit from the reduced cost of maintaining the privacy and data protection controls, which has cost millions to advertisers alone, per an industry source who requested anonymity, while giving people more transparency when it comes to their personal data. What the cost reduction looks like will depend on each provider and how they operate, according to Singh. For example, the total operating cost for three states such as CCPA, Connecticut law and Colorado law, could be reduced to a third of that operating cost with GPP. It will also help publishers evade privacy risks by providing its CMPs in one place where they gather preferences from users. This preference is then collected and pushed globally across all platforms and channels, “making it interoperable for consent management providers to operate,” Singh told Adweek. Although GPP is not mandatory, experts note that advertisers and publishers will find themselves complying with privacy regulations in some form eventually. “Regulations are hitting the books faster than we can build individual solutions for,” said Andrea Giannangelo, founder, CEO and head of product at IT consultancy iubenda. “Having our teams build to one protocol saves us loads of headache and puts us in a more sustainable place to stay on top of evolving privacy and data protection laws across the jurisdictions we operate in.” IAB Tech Lab's GPP is currently open for public comment 60 days after feedback is incorporated before the final release of the protocol, but this is the first version of the GPP. The standards issuer will continue to invest and develop this for both the consumer's and industry's evolving needs, according to said Anthony Katsur, CEO at IAB Tech Lab.