Data Sharing Choice

Data Sharing Choice (DSC) is about keeping the internet free and putting users in the driver’s seat of protecting their data privacy. This can get very technical very quickly. To explain this effectively, pick your primary lens:

I’m an advertiser

The challenge

Concerns about user data privacy have led Apple and Google to gradually remove 3rd party cookies from their browsers. This creates a set of challenges for advertisers as 3rd party cookie facilitate access to 56% of ad inventory:

Audience targeting – without the richness that advertisers get from associating profile data with 3rd party cookies across sites, anonymous, rich profiles will not be available for advertisers to build audiences around and target on. Imagine going back to a world whereby “contextual targeting” is the primary form of ad targeting on the open web.
Further dependency on the walled gardens – primarily Google, Facebook, and Amazon. As if this publisher concentration isn’t already a challenge to advertisers, the removal of 3rd party cookies further weakens the open web and makes Google, Facebook and Amazon “the only game in town” for rich targeting.
Frequency caps – without 3rd party cookies, a single user moving across multiple sites using the same browser will likely appear as a number of different users to the DSPs and ad servers. This means that the same ad might be delivered to that single user way above the frequency cap the advertiser desires (and is willing to pay for).
Measurement –attribution is already a challenging form of “art and science”. The removal of 3rd party cookies will complicate things even more, making it more of an art, and less of a science. When the same user appears as multiple different users across sites, correct measurement and quality attribution will suffer.

Limited scale solutions

Some industry players proposed user sign-in as a way to collect and provide user data and make up for the loss of 3rd party cookies in this way.

Today only 1.5% – 5% of web traffic is authenticated. Analysts estimate that, at best, no more than 20% of web traffic will be authenticated using the email sign-in option. Therefore, additional solutions are required to fill in the +80% gap.

Intent IQ’s Data Sharing Choices (‘DSC’) proposed solution

A simple, standardized invitation to opt-in to the sharing of the visited site cookie ID, IP address and user-agent, similar in nature to the increasingly prevalent opt-in to cookies, very familiar to European publishers (GDPR). Intent IQ’s solution provides a privacy-friendly universal ID across sites and devices, regardless of IP address and user-agent changes.

While third-party cookies offer 56% coverage and log-in solutions offer coverage of less than 20% of ad inventory, Intent IQ’s solution covers over 80% of ad inventory, fully addressing the 3rd party cookie demise challenges advertisers will otherwise face – by enabling targeting, frequency capping and attribution across +80% of ad inventory in a third party cookieless world.

This solution will:

Give users the choice to let the site they’re visiting share their site cookie ID, IP address, and user-agent with advertisers, or to deny this permission.
Use short, clear, helpful language that users can make sense of across a large number of websites, similar to how it’s done today for cookies in Europe.
Give the user the choice to either click on an “Accept All” button or click to actively manage the data to be shared with third parties. The user is not asked to enter any information. The “C” in DCS stands for “Choices”. The user is in the driver’s seat, making informed choices.
Put users and regulators at ease that user data is not shared without consent.
Help the open internet thrive, instead of making Google and Apple even more powerful.

Overall, to the internet user, the proposed solution is only a minor change to user experience. In opt-out regimes such as the US and Canada, it’s the addition of a simple “opt-in or manage” overlay, that users increasingly are used to seeing as they browse today’s Europe compliant sites.

Intent IQ is building a broad coalition to support this initiative.