If you are a digital publisher or own a blog or website, and you have a substantial European user-base, you have been bombarded with information about GDPR with increasing frequency and fervor. Add ShareThis to that digital media chorus! We’re here to help.
ShareThis supports the IAB Europe’s GDPR Transparency & Consent Framework and believes this is an excellent way to keep the open web “open,” and to provide room for a robust advertising landscape that enables full transparency for all participants–starting with users. The IAB Framework is a cross-industry standard that supports publishers and their partners. The effort addresses “first parties” (publishers) and other suppliers of online services, who partner with “third parties” (solution providers like ShareThis). The goal is to enable digital media companies and relevant parties who work with them, to process user data via legal bases laid down by the GDPR directive, which puts data rights more openly in the hands of consumers.
What does this mean for you, the publisher?
– It means you need to have a more robust cookie notification that allows your users to clearly understand how you (the first party) will use the cookie data you capture AND how your partners (the third parties) like ShareThis will use the cookie data we collect from your site.
– Users can easily consent to the collection of their data or refuse consent, as well as delve into the specifics of the site’s different partners and their documented use of data.
– The consented status of the cookie will be communicated, stored and accessible to all industry participants whose systems support the IAB Framework.
We’re a free social engagement and analytics tool for websites. We remain free by aggregating the data we collect and using that to build data products that primarily fuel marketer solutions and advertising performance. We never share user behavior from specific sites with our advertising partners. The breadth of our publisher network helps our partners reach interested consumers based on the thousands of actions we see users take across the ShareThis publisher network. To keep our product free for publishers, we need to keep our cookie data alive and available to our customers in a GDPR-compliant way. That means making sure our publishers have consent management platforms (CMP) that can communicate the consent status of users (and their cookies) to the industry at large and to ShareThis in particular.
We are actively reaching out to European publishers in our network to provide as much education and guidance as we can on managing user consent and GDPR compliance and will continue to do so, before and after the directive goes into effect on May 25th.
Visit the IAB Europe site to get into the details, prepare your consent solution for your users, make sure that ShareThis is in your list as an established vendor (IAB Europe application processing), and let’s work toward a more transparent and always open web!
