IAB Tech Lab Unveils Global Privacy Platform (GPP) to Consolidate Domestic and Global Privacy Signals for Digital Advertising

GPP Streamlines How Technology Makes Sense of Choice, Transparency & Consent
by Providing an Adaptive Framework That Puts the Consumer at the Center 

NEW YORK, June 1, 2022 – Following two years of collaboration with the industry, and consultation processes with technical and legal experts across the globe, IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising technical standards-setting body, is proud to announce the launch of the Global Privacy Platform (GPP). GPP is one of the products of IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc initiative. It is a single protocol designed to streamline transmitting privacy, consent, and consumer choice signals from sites and apps to ad tech providers, and integrates with existing privacy signals from Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework and CCPA in the U.S.

The GPP enables advertisers, publishers and technology vendors in the digital advertising industry to adapt to regulatory demands across markets. It reduces the cost of managing privacy compliance, and helps publishers mitigate privacy risks, by providing CMPs a single framework to encode and transmit consumer privacy preferences which they can leverage globally and across all platforms and channels. Starting today, the GPP will be available for public comment for 60 days, and will be further discussed during the upcoming IAB Tech Lab Summit: Transcend on Thursday, June 9th.

“Consumer privacy is a global issue with local and regional interpretations. One-off solutions and protocols cannot solve cross-jurisdictional consumer privacy and control challenges in the advertising ecosystem,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “After two years of industry-wide collaboration and significant legal and technical investment, the GPP is ready for global industry adoption to provide consistent privacy and consent controls across all digital media channels. The GPP ensures that consumer privacy remains at the core of everything we do through a single platform. This is the first version of the GPP. We will continue investing in and developing the protocol for both the consumer’s and industry’s evolving needs. Our work has only just begun.”

The GPP provides the flexibility required to support the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers for privacy and consumer consent. Publishers, advertisers, and ad service providers will benefit from the reduced cost of maintaining privacy and data protection controls for users across the regions they operate in and consumers will enjoy more transparency, choice, and control when it comes to their personal data. The GPP also helps ad service providers mitigate risk by reducing the fragmentation of privacy signaling, accommodating regional and international differences in privacy and data protection laws, and reducing the complexity of the consumer transparency and control signals they receive.  

“Regulations are hitting the books faster than we can build individual solutions for,” said Andrea Giannangelo, Founder, CEO & Head of Product, 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 law across the jurisdictions we operate in.”

“The fact that the Global Privacy Platform is not a one-size-fits-all approach is really positive. It’s open and extensible, and equips the industry with both a technical standard and comprehensive set of tools to approach new jurisdictions with the capability to comply with local laws and consumer expectations,” said Jon Mew, CEO, IAB UK. “It will play an instrumental role in our industry when it comes to striking a balance between privacy and sustaining an ad-supported digital media ecosystem.”

“Privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, PIPEDA, and numerous new local privacy laws, create immense complexity and fragmentation in the market. 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,” said Jason J. Raqueno, Senior Director, Privacy, at IAB Tech Lab. “GPP is designed to allow adopters to respond quickly to regional changes to privacy and data protection laws at minimal cost.”

IAB Tech Lab encourages publishers, brands, media companies, and legislative officials to provide feedback that aligns with their own requirements. To review the proposed standard and provide feedback, please go to: https://iabtechlab.com/gpp 

About IAB Technology Laboratory

Established in 2014, the IAB Technology Laboratory (Tech Lab) is a non-profit consortium that engages a member community globally to develop foundational technology and standards that enable growth and trust in the digital media ecosystem. Comprised of digital publishers, ad technology firms, agencies, marketers, and other member companies, IAB Tech Lab focuses on solutions for brand safety and ad fraud; identity, data, and consumer privacy; ad experiences and measurement; and programmatic effectiveness. Its work includes the OpenRTB real-time bidding protocol, ads.txt anti-fraud specification, Open Measurement SDK for viewability and verification, VAST video specification, and Project Rearc initiative for privacy-centric addressability. Board members/companies are listed at https://iabtechlab.com/about-the-iab-tech-lab/tech-lab-leadership/. For more information, please visit https://iabtechlab.com

IAB Tech Lab Media Contacts

Brittany Tibaldi / Michael Vaughan
347-487-6794 / 813-210-1706
btibaldi@kcsa.com / mvaughan@kcsa.com