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 online publisher

The challenge

Concerns about user data privacy have led Apple and Google to gradually remove 3rd party cookies from their browsers. As 3rd party cookies cover 56% of ad inventory and responsible for 50% – 70% of publishers’ ad revenue, this puts publishers’ biggest revenue source at risk. This, in turn, threatens the commercial viability of publishers, and hence the rich, diverse, and free internet use experience of hundreds of millions of people in the US alone.

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 of non-authenticated web traffic.

Intent IQ’s Data Sharing Choice (‘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, helping protect publishers’ ability to rely on advertising as their main revenue source 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 DSC stands for “Choice”. The user is in the driver’s seat, making informed choices
Put publishers in control of their data and in a position to stop data leakage.
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

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