Since the beta for IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) v2.0 went live on March 31, now is the time to make transition plans from v1.1, or plan out your adoption strategy if you didn’t participate in prior iterations. Below, we’ve outlined a three-phase process and recommended timelines for each. Starting your preparations early to allow more time for testing will help achieve a seamless transition from one version to the next.
Phase 1: Housekeeping
TCF v2.0 implementation planning:
1. Take inventory of all on-site vendors and partners you work with and determine whether they intend to support v2.0, and if so, when. We’ve created a TCF v2.0 vendor registration dashboard to track this. Reach out to us and ask about the dashboard to gain access.
2. For vendors and partners that will not support TCF v2.0, make sure your consent management platform (CMP) or tag manager is able to transmit consent or suppress data collection to help enable compliance for those partners, e.g. via conditional firing.
3. Review TCF v2.0 policies and get familiar with what’s new, e.g., requirements for layered UIs.
Phase 2: Evaluate and Test
1. Choose a CMP that is:
- Easy to use and customizable enough to meet brand guidelines
- Able to help you demonstrate GDPR compliance in addition to TCF, e.g., by preventing personal data processing prior to any consent signals and maintaining audit logs
- Straightforward to navigate from a consumer/user perspective
2. Configure your CMP and implement features decided on from phase 1
3. Work with your CMP provider to deploy on your site or app’s staging environment for testing and QA to ensure compliance. Some questions to consider:
- Are cookies being dropped before consent is given?
- Is the CMP interfering with other on-page vendors or solutions?
- Is geo-location working?
Phase 3: Going Live
Once everything above is completed, you should be ready to go live, ideally well before the August 15 deadline. Make sure you place your CMP script as high in the header as possible so that it loads first. Stay in close communication with your most important vendors as well to understand their support timelines.
Finally, don’t miss the deadline. TCF v2.0 is not backwards compatible and older versions of the Global Vendor and Consent Management Platform lists will be completely deprecated on August 15.
At LiveRamp, we recommend going live with TCF v2.0 by August 1 to leave room for testing and to enable compliance for IAB vendors on your site. Delaying going live or missing the deadline means risking noncompliance with v2.0, and therefore potentially hurting your marketing and/or data monetization goals.
For more information on TCF v2.0, or to learn how Privacy Manager can help enable compliance for your digital properties, please reach out to us at [email protected].
*This blog post was updated on 13 July, 2020 with new guidance from IAB Europe around the TCF transition timeline.