IAB Tech Lab has been working diligently with the digital advertising industry to develop a portfolio of addressability and privacy solutions.
One of the notable developments in the past year has been our work with Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0). Last year, Tech Lab accepted UID 2.0 source code for industry development. We began our work across the digital media landscape to create a technical standard for the secure tokenization of unique-to-user IDs.
After extensive discussions across the industry and Tech Lab’s Board, we believe that it is in the industry’s best interests that Tech Lab continues to focus on ownership and maintenance of the UID 2.0 technical specification and source code repository for the industry.
In the spirit of continuing to spearhead this as an industry-led technical specification and open-source project, we are rebranding the project to IAB Tech Lab Tokenization Framework. The technical standards supporting this framework will be a significant expansion of the work we have already performed in May 2021. It is intended to be used by constituents across the ecosystem as a comprehensive technical ID standard, with the initial adopters being ID5, The Trade Desk, and LiveRamp.
The Tech Lab will continue to steward and contribute to the open-source project and work with all industry constituents, including publishers, agencies, brands, ad technology companies, and regulators to evolve the Tokenization Framework technical specification and foster broad adoption. Future development of the specification and any related open-source code will be governed by the Tech Lab Privacy and Rearc Commit Group. That diverse group of industry leaders will help to review and prioritize proposed enhancements which will then be submitted to the Rearc Addressability Working Group for development.
The Tokenization Framework is not designed to support any single commercial ID solution. The specification is intended to support a foundation of technical connective tissue by which advertisers and publishers can interoperate with myriad ID resolution providers of a publisher’s or advertiser’s choice in a secure environment. In that spirit, we will focus our efforts on ensuring more industry participants contribute to and adopt the spec.
Given this expanded mission, and the critical role of the Tokenization Framework in driving industry-wide consensus, Tech Lab has decided it will not be taking on the technical administrator role for UID 2.0 at this point.
Tech Lab is amenable to revisiting the role of running any necessary global infrastructure at a future date.
Tech Lab will continue to hone its portfolio of addressability and privacy solutions, such as the recently released Seller Defined Audiences, which allows publishers, DMPs, and data providers to scale first-party data responsibly and reliably without data leakage or reliance on deprecated IDs and/or new, untested technologies.
About the Author
Anthony Katsur
Chief Executive Officer
IAB Tech Lab