What does EU GDPR means for Adsense?

Question about GDPR and Adsense.

[hwint]

Question: What does EU GDPR means for Adsense?

Most of the Adsense income is from interest based ads. Will this be affected by the EU GDPR?
I'm concerned because today with the latest update for my Android Phone, I got asked for permission related to interest based ads. (Maybe it is because I did disable it before. This is to see the normal ads on my pages with Adsense. But I'm still concerned.)

[MayankParmar]

Indeed. The people are scared and they apparently bought these paid services to secure their sites. GDPR-related blogs and services seems to be the most profitable niche.

[Travis]

Congratulations @MayankParmar for reaching the 1000 posts threshold.

[MayankParmar]

Lol, thanks. Most of my posts are about AdSense earnings drop complaints :)

To save thousands on GDPR compliance, some companies are blocking all EU users [techrepublic.com...] :)

[ChanandlerBong]

See, this is where it will get interesting. Eventually, a site with enough EU visitors will decide it's not worth it and block them and then the howls of protest will start.

...and then it will become an accessibility issue. Can a restaurant that can't afford a wheelchair ramp just flat out decide to "not allow" wheelchair users in?

where does the anger go then? To the EU creators of this 'restrictive' legislation or to the site blocking people?

I think this issue will run and run and get to the very heart of what the internet will eventually become, a landscape dominated by large corporations with deep enough pockets that pay-to-play is not a problem.

How many of us have the money and know-how to open a real shop? That might well become the entry criteria for running a website ten years from now.

[MayankParmar]

and then it will become an accessibility issue. Can a restaurant that can't afford a wheelchair ramp just flat out decide to "not allow" wheelchair users in?

Someone will open a restaurant for those people.

For example, if there are five recipe sites. The recipe for ice cream would be more or less same everywhere. In this case, if four of the sites decide to block EU, and the 5th one allows EU. Eventually people will visit the 5th site.

Sure thing, it would be a problem for those readers who trust a specific site.

[Travis]

where does the anger go then? To the EU creators of this 'restrictive' legislation

Don't count on it. There are much more restrictive EU laws, people are always angry or upset at them, but that's all. Did you ever saw manifestations against a EU directive or regulation? or strikes? or anything else pressuring EU congressmen to change a law?

And what would they complain about? That there are more restrictions on how sites can handle their personal data ?

or to the site blocking people?

Neither. They will just go elsewhere, and won't mind much... or, if the site which is blocking the access is really wanted, they'll use proxy and VPN, the same way they access streaming and video films, which are geographically restricted.

Eventually people will visit the 5th site.

Yes. Opportunities are arising. Without counting that it can have an impact on the ranking of sites which are blocking EU visitors. If you click on a link in the Google SERP, get blocked, and hit back, this will damage your bounce rate , and Google is taking this in consideration ...

[cheegum]

I have just signed up for the cookiebot, and i am using there plugin now - it does show the EU Consent box, but if the EU user opts out of marketing is it not supposed to hide the ads from EU visitors?

[Travis]

it not supposed to hide the ads from EU visitors?

It doesn't look like it. Reading at the this page : [cookiebot.com...] , it sounds like this is up to you to implement it

Cookiebot exposes a JavaScript object with a number of public properties, methods, events and callback functions that you can use in your website's front-end code to activate scripts individually based on the current user's consent state.

Also, I don't think that their javascript code, can interact and block Adsense from loading...

[cheegum]

Then how should this be used? What does it do when the user opts out of marketing?

I have modified my adsense code as per there documentation.

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js" type="text/plain" data-cookieconsent="marketing"></script>

[MayankParmar]

Isn't such Javascripts going to be blocked by AdBlocker and in that case popup won't show?

Instead of modifying ad codes, you can just disable personalized ads in EU.

[Travis]

@cheegum, I guess all this should be explained in their documentation.

[cheegum]

@MayankParmer+ but you still need consent for non personalised ads cause Adsense uses cookies for preventing fraud?

[MayankParmar]

We can simply show a cookies popup with link to privacy policy page. Just a agree button, no reject option.

[steviec79]

I'm beginning to ignore all the scaremongering that's going on (especially on here).

As @MayankParmar says, I'll display a standard cookie notice, which people can agree with + use the Adsense option of disabling interest-based ads for EU visitors.

That's it until I notice anything better on another site.

[dolcevita]

Standard cookienotice + disabling personalised Ads, ok but what I think is possible to ask visitor of they agree for personalised Ads and if answer is no then show to them non personalised Ads.

This implementation is not possible?

[pmays]

stevied79: I am on your side. Rly hate these EU GDPR supects who are scaring people to earn some money.

I have websites with 90 % EU traffic. It's nonsence to put on my websites pop-up for accept /decline ads, people will leave website or click no. So only option is to show contextual ads like 8 years ago = NPA = non-personalised-ads . But still we have to show cookies consent frame like these days, but with only Agree option (lot of people are nowadays ignorind this frame and using website without clicking on it).

The only thing i am not sure, if for NPA can be just Agree consent, or it must be Agree / Decline consent (before this u cant load npa ads as well). If yes, then we can just close our websites, because earnings will go down on 20% maybe or less and then there is no point to work on it.

[ChanandlerBong]

by all accounts that I've seen, asking people to explicitly agree to marketing cookies results in 'yes' approval CTRs of 0-10%. I don't think it's worthwhile and will just not show personalized ads to EU and avoid that whole scripting headache.

[mike1972]

The only thing i am not sure, if for NPA can be just Agree consent, or it must be Agree / Decline consent (before this u cant load npa ads as well). If yes, then we can just close our websites, because earnings will go down on 20% maybe or less and then there is no point to work on it.

This is where a lot of the confusion lies. The way I understood it is that if the advert places a cookie which can identify the user (and apparently many do to avoid abuse), then you can only display the ad after the user gives you his consent.

[pmays]

mike1972: If it's like you understand it, then can Google Adsense close the shop, because nobody will display ads there - and there will be ads only in his SERP, but again, only after agreeing with that. Europe is so big to be without ads - there is UK, Spain, DE, Austria very profitable countries. This could be destructive for Google. So I think it's in his interest to invent any legal loop.

[Cralamarre]

Does anyone know of a good WordPress plugin for Geo-targeting that can be used with EU cookie consent banners like the one from Silktide?

[steviec79]

Does anyone know of a good WordPress plugin for Geo-targeting that can be used with EU cookie consent banners like the one from Silktide?

I use Ad Rotate Pro, which has the geo option.

[Cralamarre]

Thanks @steviec79

[TheEnigma]

For UK visitors, worth remembering the ICO said in 2016-7 that they had received 195 'concerns' from public about cookies and 167,000 about nuisance calls, spam, sms spam. ( [ico.org.uk...] )

Now I'm sure cookie 'concerns' will increase, but does anybody think the ICO are going to be raising the level from 'low' to medium over the 75,000 adsense publishers who are all going to simply select non-personalised but show a banner 'we use cookies' and let adsense drop a cookie to prevent fraudulent activity?

[BoredMeteor]

I was pretty frustrated with this GDPR thing a week ago, but the closer we get to the date, eh. Things have cooled off.

I don't really expect things to change much. I guess we'll see. My read of the GDPR overall is that they're really more concerned with major corporations and social networks (like Facebook) and how they handle data. I do think that's worthwhile. Problem is, they've given themselves an excessively wide berth as far as their definitions of personal data and so on.

I mean, IP addresses? Does anyone know the lengths you'd have to go through to discern an individual user from just an IP address?

Here's another GDPR riddle for you (and please, someone tell me if you know the answer):

I've heard it said that the GDPR also covers EU citizens outside of EU countries. So, an EU citizen hanging out in Texas is also covered by the GDPR. How do you account for that? Let's up the ante: How do you account for multiple users of the same device, or under the same IP address? What if one person in, say, a house with a single computer, clicks "Approve" on a consent pop-up, but the next person doesn't because he or she doesn't see it (given how most of these banner solutions work)? How would you know? The only way to be 100% sure, in that case, would be to have the consent banner pop up on every single page view.

[MayankParmar]

I am not going to irritate the US readers with popup.

Just going to disable personalized AdSense ads in EU and show standard cookie popup in EU. That's it.

[keyplyr]

@BoredMeteor - I can picture a bunch of guys at the EU headquarters in Brussels sharing all these questions they find around the web and laughing their heads off!

[mike1972]

Here's another GDPR riddle for you (and please, someone tell me if you know the answer):

Yes, funny, I believe we asked this question earlier in the thread. Which is why I insist in saying that the asked implementation is terrible, it should be as simple as asking the website to show a clear link to their cookie policy and if the user uses the website then it means that he read/accepts the policy.

Isn't that how the system works offline after all? When I purchase something and there are some terms and conditions involved, I'm not allowed to pick and choose which terms and conditions I want to accept and which I want to turn off, it's either take it or leave it.

Like this it will always the website to be damaged. Imagine if it's a shared machine as you said, I enter a website and turn off all advertising options, that website will be financially damaged even if I may be the only one in the house not wanting personalised ads because my settings will be adopted for all other users.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to see the EU safeguarding the privacy of users but if in doing so individuals who make a living from a website will be badly damaged, then you're solving an issue but raising another.

[bgweb]

Has anyone taken a look at the IAB Transparency and Consent framework? See:

[github.com...]

[Travis]

Has anyone taken a look at the IAB Transparency and Consent framework?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[sudarshanms]

I saw this work around solution of displaying the cookie bar to the EU users alone in wordpress. This might work with websites where the majority of users are from other countries. I am planning on implementing it, any thoughts and suggestions, thank you [wptest.means.us.com...]