Adsense and the CMP

In last week's Friday post, Adsense and the GDPR (August 2023), I wrote,

Ads are related to cookies. It's been eight years since the last time I looked at the European cookie monster. [...] Since then, the European Union has introduced the GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation (wikipedia.org). The CMP requirements are a response to the GDPR. What does that entail for small web sites like mine? I'll look at that in the next post.

A few months ago Google introduced a new requirement.

• 2023-05-16: New Consent Management Platform requirements for serving ads in the EEA and UK • 'In 2020, we integrated our ads systems with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). That framework is supported across the advertising ecosystem today, including by numerous Consent Management Platforms (CMPs), which support many of Google’s publisher partners.'

The two phrases in italics link to two more explanatory pages -- from blog.google and iabeurope.eu -- but first let's make sure we understand the acronyms:-

• EEA : European Economic Area (wikipedia.org)
• UK : United Kingdom (aka Britain)
• IAB : Interactive Advertising Bureau

Google's permanent page on the subject is New Google consent management requirements for serving ads in the EEA and UK (for publishers; support.google.com). It sets a deadline:-

Beginning January 16, 2024, publishers and developers using Google AdSense, Ad Manager, or AdMob will be required to use a Consent Management Platform (CMP) that has been certified by Google and has integrated with the IAB's Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) when serving ads to users in the EEA or the UK.

The page contains a list of 'Google-certified CMPs' that currently has 50 names with a link for each name. Only one of the 50 names was even vaguely familiar to me, 'Google consent management solutions', so no prize for guessing which one I chose to investigate further. Its link went to a page titled, About Privacy & Messaging (support.google.com). The 'Get started' message instructed,

To access your Privacy & Messaging page, sign in to your AdSense account and click Privacy & Messaging in the AdSense sidebar.

That leads to the next stage of the adventure, which I'll cover in the next Friday post.