GDPR compliance and using CMPs

What is GDPR, and why we need it

General Data Protection Regulation came into effect on May 25, 2018. It comprises a set of regulations on data processing, data protection, and privacy for all individuals within the EU. It primarily aims to inform web surfers from the EU about when and how their personal data will be used. Therefore, GDPR applies to any entity that collects, manages, and processes the personal data of EU subjects.

Transparency is the key to becoming GDPR-compliant. Hence any reasons for data collection and processing should be clearly stated. In addition, the collected data should only be used for the intended purposes, and no extra data should be collected, stored, or processed.

Using CMPs – what publishers need to know

The easiest way for publishers to be GDPR compliant is to ask their users for consent (i.e., permission) to use their data. It may look easy, but it can become extremely complicated, especially for those publishers who work with different ad tech vendors. In this case, they need to obtain consent from each of those vendors. And that's where consent management platforms (or CMPs) come into play. Basically, CMPs offer publishers a tool for obtaining users' consent for their personal data collection and management.

CMPs inform website visitors about the types of data they will collect and what they need it for. Then they store and pass consent data in the form of a string (GDPR consent string). The string itself is a set of ones and zeros that contain information about which vendors have user consent to use their data and which don't.

GDPR compliance and Adserver.Online

We, at Adsever.Online, take privacy very seriously and want our users to be GDPR compliant. Therefore, we have implemented full support of consent management platforms (CMPs). Our users, both individual webmasters and ad agencies/networks, can use any CMPs compatible with the technical standard of the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF).

You can read more about how to become GDPR compliant with Adserver.Online in this article.