By Lou Mastria
With 52.6m Americans using Spanish as their primary language – and as many as 41m speaking only Spanish – we believe consumer education and privacy protection developments in Spanish are every bit as crucial as their English-language counterparts.
Since the launch of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Principles nine years ago, the primary focus of the Principles and their interpretation has been the consumer. Our endeavor to extend to her meaningful privacy protections where interest-based advertising (IBA) occurs has been remarkably successful.
The YourAdChoices icon is globally served more than 1 trillion times per month – that’s truly transparency and consumer control at Internet scale.
That’s also transparency and consumer control at mobile scale – where the icon appears on IBA in mobile apps, based on cross-app data collection.
Knowing the importance of mobile devices to native Spanish speakers in the United States, in 2015 we launched a Spanish-language version of our AppChoices consumer choice tool. AppChoices enables consumers to opt out of cross-app data collection for IBA on mobile platforms and devices. Nearly four dozen mobile IBA providers participate in AppChoices, and the AppChoices mobile app – in English and Spanish – can be downloaded from Apple, Google and Amazon app stores.
We didn’t stop there. We also launched then a Spanish-version of our consumer-focused Web site, YourAdChoices.com, serving to give consumers extended information about IBA, how it is created, and giving consumers the means to opt out.
This past summer, we also took our WebChoices tool and enabled a Spanish-language version for U.S. native Spanish speakers. WebChoices gives consumers an explanation of how interest-based ads are served and the means to opt out of desktop and mobile browser-viewing data that is collected for IBA purposes. More than 130 companies participate in this tool.
In September, we commissioned a Spanish-language consumer education article which was distributed to hundreds of Spanish-language online and offline media outlets – helping to educate this market about the privacy protections afforded to them through the YourAdChoices icon and the entire DAA program.
With 52.6 million Americans using Spanish as their primary language – and as many as 41 million speaking only Spanish – we believe these consumer education and protection developments are every bit as crucial as their English-language counterparts.
We will bring this practical and important fact to bear in our Political Ads initiative as well.
Let’s recognize the rise of primarily Spanish-speaking consumers – and the thriving advertising ecosystem that exists to reach this important market. Here, IBA is flourishing here, too, so we have responsibility to help make sure these valued consumers also know they have transparency and control when IBA – and the YourAdChoices icon -- appears to them.
