What do Muskets, Microchips and Ad Privacy Compliance Have in Common?

You might think a discussion of standards is the most boring thing in the world, but it’s not.

Until the early 1900s, climbing a long rickety ladder to change a lightbulb high up in a barn could drive a farmhand crazy. What kind of socket was up there?

If it were a Thomson-Houston socket, you’d need a matching bulb. What if it was a Sawyer-Man? Or maybe a Westinghouse? It might be a bayonet mount or a wedge base, for that matter. You’d have no way of knowing until you got all the way up the ladder.

In your entire life, you’ve never thought twice about changing a standard lightbulb, and here’s why. Because a standard lightbulb works in any socket on Earth, and they all screw in exactly the same way.

That’s the power of standards.

Standards have driven nearly all business progress since the Industrial Revolution. We’re talking about everything from interchangeable parts for muskets to the interoperability of microchips and beyond.

Wherever there are standards, productivity and quality go up and costs go down.

Nearly everything we take for granted today, from the internet to wi-fi to the computer screen you’re probably reading this on owes a debt to smart standardization.

Standards enable scale, and we need to appreciate and defend the people who create them. It’s dangerous when billionaires sue an industry group to make them go away because they don’t like the way the standard works.

It’s even more dangerous when an industry doesn’t stand up to bullies, especially since the entire advertising business is built on standards that enable scale. There are standard sizes for billboards and print ads and banner ads (one of the things I pushed for when I helped co-found the IAB in 1996), standard lengths for audio and video ads, and standards for open RTB.

We need a standardized approach to compliance too. I co-founded SafeGuard Privacy because while digital advertising is now a regulated industry, it was obvious that a lack of standardization was holding compliance back.

Compliance sounds easy, but it really isn’t. There’s no Federal privacy law that covers everything. Instead, advertisers are confronted by a patchwork of state-by-state regulation. Already there are up to 19 generally applicable state privacy laws with varying effective dates — and more legislation is on the way.

And the deeper you dig into it, the more complicated things get. As just one example, nearly every state aims to protect sensitive data. But no two states define what “sensitive data” is in exactly the same way. What’s clearly off-limits in one state is undefined or fuzzy in other states. Some states have outlier provisions that other states haven’t thought about at all. It’s so complicated that we decided to publish a PDF to help clarify things.

Advertising simply isn’t used to being a regulated industry, and the industry’s inexperience shows. A lot of companies still don’t even have a line item in the budget for compliance. It’s a cost of doing business, but the cost is not accounted for in most cases.

Their organizations are understaffed, and they’re trying to manage everything on Excel spreadsheets. They’re scrambling to send out dozens of questionnaires a month. A lot of those questionnaires are generic and out of date because it’s too hard to keep up. Most of the questionnaires fail to address the actual uses of personal information contemplated by the business arrangement and the entirety of each state law. Sometimes, the surveys come back incomplete… if they come back at all. This is no way to manage anything.

It’s chaos, which is not only bad for business — it introduces legal and reputational risks that marketers need to avoid.

Standards enable scale, and that applies to privacy compliance too.

That’s why we partnered with IAB to create IAB Diligence Platform. It’s a standardized approach that ensures smart, auditable compliance.

It’s built on the SafeGuard Privacy Platform, which features robust state law assessments and a vendor compliance hub that lets users complete the diligence questionnaire once and share it again and again. IAB members that are already on the SafeGuard Privacy platform are seeing 80%+ efficiency gains by managing multiple laws concurrently and automating vendor compliance. Standards work.

They have a single source of truth for members to handle diligence efficiently.

They’re saving dozens of FTE hours a month.

But maybe the most important thing is that it works.

It's auditable and defensible. If a state asks, you can show every single step you took. You can prove that you made every possible effort to be in compliance, every step of the way.

This is especially important because advertisers are not just responsible for what you do, but what your partners do too. As Akshan Soltani, the Executive Director of the California Privacy Protection Agency said, “The degree that you are not culpable if your downstream actor misuses the data or doesn’t honor consumer rights requests is based on the degree to which you’ve done due diligence.”

Compliance isn’t optional, and it’s vital to get it right.

A standardized approach can make all the difference.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.