Question Google Admob - Consent Management Platform CMP needed - 1st January 2024

Hey everyone,

today I noticed in my Admob-Interface, that, to be GDPR compliant, I have to integrate/use a Consent Management Platform (CMP) from the 1st of January 2024.

I have no clue on how to do this, they say that I can integrate the "UMP SDK" or another third-party Consent Manager.

Can someone help me or at least give me a hint on that, on how I can integrate this into my unity game? Is there already an asset or sdk that can handle that, and that automatically sends the needed info to that database where I can collect these consent-data. If possible, it should be free with no monthly fees. If there's no platform offering it for free I'd of course be glad if you guys could gimme a hint on a platform that's cheap.

Everyone having apps running in european or united kingdom - stores (no matter if appstore or play store) has to have a Consent Management Platform running from 1st of January 2024, that tracks who has made a consent to be shown ads to and so on - else you get penaltied.

This is really urgent and I'm sure it hits many developers / publishers, who are displaying ads in their games, as the european market is big.

I hope someone sees my thread and I'm very happy for help. If there are any assets that are easy to implement on this, please let me know.

Best regards

 

Yeah, i think Unity need to consider it. Based on our research, Google AdMob SDK has this UMP support, but it is not friendly for the app which use the IronSource (or another audient network platform). Meanwhile, the AdMob SDK Unity only include UMP after 7.4.0, this version seems like not support Gradle 6.1.1 which is the default option for Unity 2021. There are lots of build issues.

I think either Unity or IronSource (LevelPlay) should help to support this feature

 

Okay, sure. There's a couple of CMP available, but everything costs a bunch of money per month. I can't imagine how solo-devs will still be able to handle this when putting on a new title without a budget.

Can't understand why they put such stones in our ways, you already don't really make much money with ads, especially at the beginning.

 

Hi! I am also interested in the solution for IronSource(LevelPlay)

 

It's not just any CMP, it has to be one of these certified Google CMP's: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/13554116?hl=en#zippy=

I already do my own consent interface, so it's disappointing to have done all this work to have it replaced with one that doesn't integrate as nicely with the game's UI. Perhaps there are some advantages to having consistency with the user's consent experience, such as what apple did with ATT?

It looks like Google does provide their own Android SDK, which is likely free, but I don't know if it has a Unity SDK. Obviously this is extra, unexpected work for small developers and it's not in Unity's best interest to make it harder for their developers to use Unity Ads in EU, so I hope they can weigh in with an easy solution.

 

https://developers.google.com/admob/unity/privacy

 

How does one use it in practice?
Do we need to make a popup control box that the user press underage or not and then it is saved locally forever or what?

 

In practice, the google UMP is next to useless if you want to get revenue from advertising in the EU. I've been banging my head against this wall for more than two weeks now.

It shows consent forms when needed, but the consent text is not written in a way that an end user can really comprehend. The consent form are clearly not designed around desired outcomes for end users. End users might consider "personalised ads", "non-personalised ads", or "no ads" to be sensible choices. The forms are constructed to directly meet the specific legal requirements of the GDPR, and their language and workflow reflect this.

Further - in the EU you're apparently not allowed to hide functionality behind gaining consent. Try doing a google search for "EU consent wall". This means that asking a user for consent, and disallowing access if consent is not given is apparently not ok - even crimping functionality is likely not ok. You're only allow to crimp functionality that cannot work without the requested consent. Its a bit hard to argue that consenting to the data processing and storage of advertisers is essential for functionality. Sure it might be essential from a business perspective, but who knows if it has been legally tested, or if small players are likely to get (heftily) fined.. probably not.. but I'd still like to do the right thing.

If the user consents to everything in the displayed form then ads MAY be displayed - although there do seem to be some issues in my testing and sometimes ads simply refuse to load even when consent is granted. I saw ads for a while - and then they just inexplicably stopped being served.

If the user chooses to take a more active approach and manage their consent options within the dialog you're just not going to see any ads from admob UNLESS they jump through hoops - finding the appropriate settings in 3 levels of dialog, and scrolling through nearly 200 unsorted ad providers to find google and give it the required permissions.

There is no API for understanding the user's consent choices once the dialog is closed. There is some third party code to help parse the resulting consent string floating around here and there - but to me it looks pretty brittle.

The forms do not remember previous selections (seems to be a legal requirement of GDPR). Every time the consent for is opened it is reset to default state.

I am at a complete loss here. I really dont understand how small f2p shops are supposed to navigate through this morass in any meaningful way. I have posted on a couple of unity formus and on the admod sdk google group, but I dont seem to ever get any actionable answers. I'm considering just not supporting the EU at all.

 

I am also facing this issue, in my testing I found out, in the GDPR consent popup of Google User Messaging Platform (UMP) SDK, if the user clicks on "CONSENT" then ads works fine. But if the user does not click on "CONSENT" and If clicks on "MANAGE OPTIONS" then on "CONFIRM CHOICES" without changing any option, no ads are displayed afterwards.

Seems like we have to have user's consent to display any ads? If this is the intended behavior of the SDK, then it lets the user remove ads for free, just by not giving consent.

It is a huge issue for everyone developing apps that are supported by ads. It kind of makes it useless to release apps in EU. Some users might give consent, but I think majority of users will just not. I hope Unity comes up with a solution to this GDPR consent situation.

 

Wow for real? I haven't tried it yet.... That's really f'ed.
Is it GDPR that forces this on us and Ad providers such as Google Admob?

 

@Rickard87 basically yes. It is privacy regulation and legal decisions on its application (e.g. against facebook and apple) that drives this.

Unfortunately it results in a lot of the commentary, discussion and implementation crammed full of legal terminology and arse-covering. The most baffling is the legal determinations that consent walls and using contract as a legal basis are not allowed in the legislation (i.e. among other things, you cannot rely on terms that only grant access when consent for use of private data is given)

It leaves me scratching my head. Not being in the EU, its hard to find out how real applications are dealing with the complexity.

As a one person f2p shop - I've spent too much time on this. I'm just going to use the google UMP - with its many flaws, as it is really the ONLY free implementation that I can find that will allow me to use admob to serve ads post Jan 2024.

In the EU I'm going to have to assume consent will not be given most of the time - of course I wont be able to collect analytics without consent, so its going to be a guessing game. I will just have a prominent notification in my game suggesting that if people prefer not to consent to advertising that they take advantage of IAP to remove ads.