IAB UK proposes to limit content categories in the bid requests

IAB UK last month announced is proposing to ICO, the UK regulator, to limit the content categories in the bid requests. The proposal will be presented to UK’s data regulator by mid-December.

This is an answer to ICO’s concerns about the special categories of data, that include health, sex life, sexual orientation, genetic, racial or ethnic, biometric, or religious/trade union/philosophical/political membership.

IAB UK says is planning “to adopt some rules for the UK market that would minimise the inclusion of content category data in a bid request when it is generated.”

IAB UK understanding is that the content categories are not critical to the ad serving process or other associated processes (such as content verification, which uses other data). IAB UK says that is working on how these ‘rules’ are defined and how they can be technically implemented in practice.

Google last month announced that will stop the contextual information on the bid requests, starting in February 2020.

ICO’s concern is that content categories on the bid requests can be associated with user IDs or other personal information and inadvertently become special category data, which cannot be processed without the user’s explicit consent.