General privacy and consent information

This article informs about general privacy and consent information for publishers

Performing different tasks on your website or app that involves a user's personally identifiable information (PII) often requires consent to do so. 

It depends a little bit where in the world your company or personal legal basis is and where in the world your website or app has traffic from when it comes to how you should treat PII. 

The European Union defines personal data as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.

It can thereby be anything your website or app collects about a user that can be used for understanding the behavior of the user. A randomized string about a user (used in regards of IAB's TCF consent strings) is even though it is randomized and not directly identifiable indeed personal data.

PII handling in the EEA and the UK

Due to EU's GDPR law, which the UK adopted as well, it is mandatory to ask each individual user coming from countries of the EEA and UK for consent to handle their PII. Because of this, an industry leading way to handle PIIs for users in the EEA and UK is to enable a Consent Management Platform, or CMP. 

A CMP handles the fetching of consent from each individual user on a page and makes each individual user's consent data available to scripts and actors on a website or app to respect. A CMP is however not responsible over each actor's actual respect of the consent data. Meaning, an actor used on a website for tracking the amount of times an ad for apples have been shown to users could in fact be told not to use the PII by the CMP, but in fact ignore it. However, this is not normal. As the industry becomes increasingly aware of the regulations regarding PIIs, its strengthening its hold on the ins and outs of handling consent data. 

Users most often say yes to all handling of their PIIs, aka. cookies to be used. About 90-95% of users that are involved in meeting Holid.io's products say yes to data handling. Holid.io works continiously with improving consent numbers by optimizing CMP loading speed, design and stylizing of the CMP and vendor availability. 

Further reading

• Adding a CMP from Holid.io to your website or app.
• When using ads with Holid.io, getting a CMP automatically from Holid.io.
• What to think about when using your own CMP with Holid.io.