Daniel Sepulveda, our vp of government relations, contributed to the latest edition of the IAB EU blog series on the GDPR. Read his section below and the full post here.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has elevated the importance globally of data protection and forced new public and private efforts to rise to the challenge.
At MediaMath, we have worked feverishly to get GDPR compliance right by: consulting with legal counsel, partners, providers and others; ensuring compliance of technology products and services used; and holding discussions and working groups with consumers, policymakers, marketers, publishers and technology companies. Elsewhere, in companies as large as IBM to companies our size, and small and medium-sized start-ups engaging Europeans online, multiple millions of dollars and Euros and thousands of manhours are going into doing right by the consumer as directed in the GDPR. Marketers are mostly continuing their campaigns (including those traded via programmatic technologies) as they were designed prior to GDPR implementation. There was an initial dip in supply that is beginning to return to where it was before.
The industry has heard the message from European citizens and their regulators that we should focus on consumer protection in the digital age by putting consumers in charge of their experiences and identity.
It’s early days and we don’t consider the work done, but there is reason to celebrate and embrace the work and cooperation taking place both within and across stakeholders in industry, civil society and government to rise to the GDPR challenge.
What we are witnessing in Europe is an evolving model for achieving public interest ends that combines self-regulatory work like the construction of the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) with public-private cooperation and conversations through multi-stakeholder forums like the German Marshall Fund and the World Economic Forum with an open and inclusive approach on the part of regulators to interpreting and implementing the GDPR. These are positive developments. It is important for suppliers like Google in particular to integrate into the IAB Europe Framework to give the market greater certainty and sense of joint problem-solving.
Within these developments, we believe that the importance of the IAB Europe’s Framework cannot be overemphasised. It offers a good faith effort on the part of the industry to respect the GDPR and enable continued digital growth. By creating a mechanism for website operators to make clear to consumers which other digital actors are involved in the processing of their data and for what purposes, we are making the digital supply chain visible and a matter of choice for consumers. We hope regulators and thought leaders will recognise and work with us as we iterate on the Framework and urge all actors in the digital economy to support and use the Framework as we continue to endeavour to both comply with the GDPR and hold ongoing global discussions about privacy in the digital age.