The IAB Diligence Platform is IAB’s data privacy compliance initiative, aimed at standardizing vendors’ privacy accountability across the digital advertising ecosystem.
The Story Behind
Over the past few years, the continuous harshening of privacy laws and regulations, particularly in the U.S. has had a growing impact on the online advertising industry. Namely, the latest iteration of CCPA, for example, has put more pressure (and liability) on digital companies to assess and ensure their ad vendors’ compliance in terms of their data practices.
In view of the ever-changing regulatory environment, IAB’s PIAT (short for Privacy Implementation and Accountability Taskforce) has introduced its Diligence Platform initiative, which should enable digital businesses evaluate their ad partners’ (e.g. SSPs and DSPs) data privacy practices, when needed, hence ensuring their own compliance with the relevant laws.
What’s Inside
Powered by SafeGuard Privacy, the IAB Diligence Platform enables digital ad companies and ad tech providers to answer industry-specific questionnaires, carefully composed by the reputable privacy lawyers, then share their answers with existing (and potential) business partners, when required, either manually or in an automatic mode, as well as further update their data, when the relevant laws change or anytime, upon their data practice update/modification.
Accordingly, publishers and advertisers, for instance, can look up and monitor their ad tech vendor privacy accountability data in the intuitive platform dashboard.
Key Benefits
According to IAB, the key benefits of the IAB Diligence Platform are its comprehensiveness, efficiency and auditability. In plain words, the platform should simplify digital businesses’ operational routine, while securing their data privacy compliance.
In practical terms, this means a publisher, for instance, won’t need to answer multiple ad partners’ information requests (RFIs), regarding their data privacy measures and policies, at a time, and won’t need to send over their own numerous RFIs to partners either. Instead, they will be able to submit their data to the IAB Diligence Platform for partner access, while being able to assess their practices as well.
Perspectives of Adoption
As good as the idea of the IAB Diligence Platform may sound, its industry-wide adoption is dependent on how willing and prompt ad companies will be in terms of transforming their current operational routine in favor of this newly-introduced initiative. And as of the end of March 2024 it still has a long way to go.