Our consent banner and agent are based on a technical standard that we are currently developing and will soon be making freely available for discussion. We are integrating similar, existing standardisation initiatives into our standard in order to ensure its broadest possible acceptance. In doing so, we are pursuing two goals here: Firstly, we want to ensure that your users no longer have to ‘familiarise’ themselves with countless, varying iterations of consent banners, but can instead rely on a common scheme for the visual and textual presentation of consent banners. This will allow your users to make better informed decisions to protect their privacy when using websites and other services.
Secondly, our common technical standard makes it easier for providers of websites and other services to apply data protection regulations. By providing a technical standard for all providers, their services can exchange the necessary technical signals without having to go through a complex coordination process. This is why we additionally offer our products as white label solutions: Other platforms, such as those for managing consents (CMPs), providers of browsers or Personal Information Management Services (PIMS) such as the electronic patient file, eIDAS or Solid Pods may easily integrate our designs together with the necessary technical and organisational components into their own solutions on the basis of our standard. We also offer our standard as an important building block for the legally effective sharing of data in European Data Spaces and the International Data Space (IDS).
The existing standardisations and proposals on which our standard is based include private, non-profit and industrial initiatives, provided that they make a constructive contribution to standardising the technical, organisational and, not least, legal conditions for the effective implementation of data protection. These include taxonomies such as, and in particular, the W3C Data Privacy Vocabulary and Controls but also the Content Taxonomy of the IAB Tech Lab, as well as ISO standards such as those for consent records and receipts (ISO/IEC TS 27560:2023 Consent Records and Receipts) and privacy by design (ISO 31700-1:2023 Consumer protection – Privacy by design for consumer goods and services). Finally, very important for our standard are specifications for consent management such as Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control and, in particular, the Advanced Data Protection Protocol (ADPC). The latter was developed by the Sustainable Computing Lab (CSL) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business together with the non-profit data protection organisation Noyb, which enables more flexible and specific consent settings than the aforementioned US specifications. These extensions are essential for the European legal area and for protecting the different interests of end users, and therefore also represent a central component of the standard we are currently developing.
Since our technical standard is freely accessible to everyone and is aimed at the widest possible use, we call our standard universal: a standard for service and platform providers, users and authorities - for seamless privacy in our online world.