Transparency & Consent Framework

At long last the most prominent GDPR case targeting the legal standing of the IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) has been settled.

In today’s newsletter: IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework operates under threat; DSPs frown upon ID bridging; and Google Ads is getting into marketing mix modeling.

Belgium’s data protection authority announced on Thursday that it has approved IAB Europe’s action plan, a six-month overhaul of the TCF, which was deemed illegal by the Belgian agency in February. But, a bit like in a triple-jump competition, this first hop only gets IAB Europe a small part of the distance it needs to travel.

IAB Europe’s litigation with Belgium’s data protection authority (DPA), which began in February with a ruling over the legality of IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF), will drag on for another year at least. This week the Belgian appeals court deferred specific questions in the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The appeals court will not deliberate until these questions are answered.

The IAB Tech Lab announced its Global Privacy Platform (GPP), a framework to standardize the sharing of consent signals so companies can more easily comply with global privacy regulations. “It’s a protocol for streamlining and managing cross-jurisdictional privacy compliance,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur – which is why the platform will be ready to incorporate new consent strings within the framework as they emerge.

We need to find a balance between privacy and sustaining an ad-supported digital media ecosystem, writes Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab. But no one will tolerate half measures going forward. To that end, IAB Tech Lab and its members are developing a portfolio of practical technical standards meant to help the ad industry adapt to evolving consumer expectations, regulations and related browser and OS changes.

Legal and court losses are piling up across Europe for American ad tech companies – and for Google. Turns out navigating the GDPR and last year’s Schrems II decision, which invalidated Privacy Shield, the former data-sharing agreement between the US and the EU, is far from straightforward. In January, the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) […]