Over the last few years, both Apple and Google have announced that they are going to discontinue support for third-party cookies in the name of consumer privacy. One of the early unintended consequences is that the market is being flooded with new identity solutions, many of which are based on hashed email addresses. It is somewhat ironic that the cookie—a completely anonymous identifier that the consumer can easily control in the browser settings—could be replaced by a hashed email identifier built from PII without the consumer’s consent.
GAPS IN THE CURRENT PRIVACY SETUP
The elimination of cookies exposes other key gaps in the current privacy setup. For example, when consumers register on a publisher site, they often are asked to acknowledge a privacy policy—a long document written in size 6 font that few ever read.
There are also gaps in the current notification solutions. For example, Ad Choices notifies the consumer as to what data was used to drive the targeted ad buy. That would be an acceptable solution if the ad buy were the only thing to be concerned about. However, there are other activities separate from the ad buy itself (e.g. offline data onboarding, attribution, creative personalization) that are not covered by Ad Choices and require a solution.
Flashtalking believes the new identity solutions must elevate the privacy discussion to respect the rights of consumers while meeting the targeting and measurement needs of responsible advertisers. We articulate these principles and responsibilities in the Flashtalking “Identity Privacy Principles”:
Any operation involving identity, even properly pseudonymized, requires clear notice to the consumer.
At every touchpoint, consumers should be offered clear and transparent access to information on how their data will be used, and the opportunity to opt-out.
Consumer data should not be shared without the consumer’s opportunity to opt-out.
PRIVACY ICON
Flashtalking accepts its responsibility for ensuring privacy is respected, providing notice and choice on every ad served with FTrack via the FTrack privacy icon. Upon clicking the icon, the consumer is taken to our privacy information page, where we explain who we are, what data we collect, and what we do with it. We then give the consumer the opportunity to opt out globally on our site or through Ad Choices. Because the ad server renders the creative on every ad impression opportunity, Flashtalking offers the advertiser the best vantage point to administer privacy notice and choice.
Flashtalking believes this approach represents a significant improvement over current approaches and addresses the personalization and measurement use cases that are beyond the purview of Ad Choices. As part of our commitment to advancing the industry-wide privacy agenda, we intend to allow partners to use the FTrack privacy icon for free, and have it push to their own privacy notification pages.
In case you missed it, read our last blog post in this series, Part 5: Identity Building Block 1 - FTrack
Read our next blog post, Part 7: Identity Building Block 3 - IDConnect.
