In brief, Global Privacy Platform (GPP) is the IAB Tech Lab’s initiative, aimed at streamlining technical standards on privacy in a unified framework to ensure online advertising businesses’ adherence with privacy laws and regulations across the global marketplace.
A Story Behind GPP
IAB Tech Lab members have developed the Global Privacy Platform, aiming to address challenges related to digital ad companies’ compliance with the varying privacy laws and regulations across jurisdictions, while providing end users with more control over their Personal Data and its use for online advertising purposes.
Benefits & Tech Specifics
The implementation of GPP should enable businesses working in the online advertising industry to not only adhere to regional-specific data protection laws, but also adjust to the ongoing evolution and convergence of regulations anytime in future, as smoothly as possible.
Namely, from a publishers perspective, the adoption of GPP should help:
- substantially reduce costs and minimize operational efforts, currently required to implement the fragmented privacy-related ad tech
- provide more flexibility, regarding the adaptation to the newly-introduced requirements anytime in future.
Being built on the basis of the existing TCF 2.0 framework, the GPP initiative uses the so-called “TC String”, composed of discrete segments, supporting multiple privacy formats and signals (both existing & new ones), as a starting point.
The specification implies the development of somewhat a unified architecture for encoding and transferring signals on user consent and privacy choices (e.g. by vendor, by purpose, etc.), metadata on the context of these choices (timestamps, CMP & publisher info, etc.) and additional restrictions (i.e. jurisdictional, legal or else), if any, across the digital ad supply chain.
GPP Adoption Time Frame
IAB Tech Lab released the first RFC of the Global Privacy Platform specification in March 2021, and the final version is still in the works.