What is the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF)?
The IAB Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) is an industry standard from IAB Europe that lets websites and apps collect users' privacy choices through a consent management platform and pass them to ad tech vendors as a standardized consent string. Vendors read the string to know whether they may process a user's data for specific purposes like ad personalization.
The IAB TCF defines purposes (such as storing information on a device or personalizing ads), a registry of vendors, and the consent string format. A CMP shows the consent banner and writes the string, which travels in each bid request.
The framework has faced legal challenges: Belgium's data protection authority found problems with it in 2022, and the EU Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that the TC string can be personal data. IAB Europe has revised the framework (version 2.2 arrived in 2023). In the US, the IAB Tech Lab's IAB Global Privacy Platform plays a similar role for state privacy laws.