Quantcast, Smaato release tools in support of the IAB Framework for GDPR

With GDPR-Day arriving in less than two weeks, ad tech vendors are beginning to launch consent mechanisms that conform to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) recently announced Transparency and Consent Framework.

This week, measurement/analytics firm Quantcast is out with a free consent platform called Quantcast Choice, which it says is the first widely available implementation thus far in the new category of consent management platforms for websites.

The platform, Chief Privacy Officer Ghita Harris-Newton told me, has been in beta since February and has been tested by publishers in the US and Europe.

When first visiting a site employing Quantcast Choice, a user will see consent choices in one of several possible ways, as determined by that site: a take-over screen, a pop-up or a large banner, with the user interface customizable by the site. Here’s a sample screen:

The screen will ask the visitor to click consent for use of specific kinds of personal data for specific advertising purposes, as well as to grant consent to specific third-party vendors (such as ad exchanges) approved by the site.

The user will be able to drill down into increasingly granular choices, if the site so determines. The consent given will then be implemented during a visit to the rest of the site, or on the next visit to that site, and a user can manage her consent profile. If consent for ads targeted by the visitor’s personal data is not granted, the site can simply show a general ad based on context, such as the content of the page being visited.

Harris-Newton said her company has no plans to add premium fee-based levels to this free self-service portal, which is available worldwide, as Quantcast “believes in the [IAB] Framework as the path forward.”

Backstage, the platform connects to a shared IAB domain where consent-enabled cookies are duplicated, so they can be searched by vendors for the consent status of individual visitors. As per the Framework, consent by a specific user for an individual ad display is stored in the OpenRTB ad call from the page visited by that user, when the page inventory is looking for an ad.

When it was announced in March, the new IAB Framework was focused on websites. At the beginning of this month, the IAB Tech Lab and IAB Europe updated the framework with support for mobile apps.

Last week, mobile ad platform Smaato announced it was the first to support the in-app specs within its software development kit (SDK).

Smaato Chief Product Officer Freddy Friedman told me that his company, working with other vendors, has also developed what appears to be the first open-source consent tool for mobile apps. It will be integrated with the Smaato SDK and released soon.

He said via email that, while consent for targeted in-app ads can be stored in the same shared domain as the web and mobile web, in most cases, it probably will not.

“The in-app consent tool utilizes a local storage within the device (iOS or Android),” he wrote, “so that there is no connection needed with an external server/domain to keep that consent information.”

The consent info will not be directly accessible by users through the consent tool, he said, but only to SDKs from advertisers. If users want to access their consent profiles, the app they’re using — integrated with the consent tool — will enable them to view or modify the consent settings.