The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) was created by IAB Europe to help publishers, advertisers, and ad networks comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Directive (Cookie Law).
The aim of the TCF is to provide the publishing and advertising industries “a common language with which to communicate consumer consent for the delivery of relevant online advertising and content.”
First introduced in April 2018, IAB TCF provided direct guidance to publishers, advertisers, and vendors on how to provide transparency and notice about user data capture and data management. Publishers and website operators who monetize their content via third-party advertisers are able to communicate to vendors, in a standardized way, what preferences users have expressed when it comes to their personal data.
What is TCF v2.0?
On August 21, 2019, IAB Europe announced the second iteration of the TCF called TCF v2.0. TCF v2.0 continues to support the aim of the first TCF: to increase consumer transparency, choice, management by digital properties of consent and compliance, and industry collaboration that centers on standardization.
Some important upgrades of the TCF v2.0 are:
- Better transparency to consumers with updated TCF v2.0 purposes and features, to better understand how their data is used;
- Enhanced consumer controls making it easy for consumers to grant, refuse, or revoke their consent, and to object to data processing not based on consent;
- More publisher controls through the ability to specify the purposes for which they allow each of their partners to process personal data collected on their properties
It’s important to note that TCF v2.0 is not backwards compatible with TCF v1.0 and will require your input. Additionally, IAB requires all CMPs to register with TCF v2.0. This means that if you created your own CMP (and didn’t register it) or work with an unregistered CMP, it will no longer be valid in TCF v2.0, even if it technologically supports the new signal.
The bottom line is: all publishers and advertisers must implement a CMP that is compliant with TCF v2.0 - otherwise they will no longer be able to use the TCF. TCF v1 has been deprecated as of August 15th, 2020.