The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s IAB Tech Lab has unveiled the Global Privacy Platform (GPP) to standardize U.S. and global privacy preferences for digital ads and wants input on the plan.
Getting the privacy part of targeted advertising right could be crucial to the continued health of what has been a booming online ad market. Statista.com predicted that digital ad spending in the U.S. alone will top $200 billion by 2025.
The fruits of Protect Rearc and two years in the making, the GPP is a single protocol for transmitting privacy, consent and consumer-choice preferences from websites and apps to advertising tech providers. The idea is to mitigate privacy risks and square those protections with Europe’s Transparency and Consent regime and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) — the U.S. has no national privacy framework, but one of the reasons for coming up with GPP is the threat of a balkanized system of differing state (and international) approaches.
“Regulations are hitting the books faster than we can build individual solutions for,” said Andrea Giannangelo, CEO of Iubenda, which provides privacy compliance services.
“Privacy regulations such as the GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, PIPEDA and numerous new local privacy laws, create immense complexity and fragmentation in the market," IAB Tech Lab senior director Jason Raqueno said. "The GPP is intended to enable participants across the advertising supply chain to navigate the complexity of numerous overlapping global privacy laws through a single platform and consent signaling protocol."
Rearc was launched in 2020 in response to the limitations of third-party cookies and other targeted ad identifiers.
Also: IAB Says National Privacy Regime Is Job One
According to IAB Tech Lab, which is the digital ad industry’s standard-setting body, the GPP “enables advertisers, publishers, and technology vendors in the digital advertising industry to adapt to regulatory demands across markets," cuts the cost of managing privacy compliance, and helps reduce risk by "a single framework to encode and transmit consumer privacy preferences, which they can leverage globally and across all platforms and channels.”
IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur said the GPP is ready for global adoption, but IAB is first seeking comment (it will give interested parties 60 days). IAB is looking for input from “publishers, brands, media companies and legislative officials.” ■
