European regulations overview and guidance

Tag an ad request for EEA, the UK, and Switzerland users for restricted data processing

You can mark your ad requests to receive treatment for users in the European Economic Area (EEA), the UK, and Switzerland for restricted data processing using the TFUA (formerly “Tag For Under the Age of Consent”) tag. This feature is designed to help facilitate compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and related child privacy regulations, such as the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC). Note that you may have other legal obligations under the GDPR and AADC. Please review all regulatory guidance and consult with your own legal counsel. Please remember that Google's tools are designed to facilitate compliance and do not relieve any particular publisher of its obligations under the law. Learn more about how the GDPR and AADC affect publishers.

When using this feature, a TFUA parameter will be included in the ad request. This parameter disables personalized advertising, including remarketing, for that specific ad request. It also disables requests to third-party ad vendors, such as ad measurement pixels and third-party ad servers. The parameter does not affect your use of Ad Manager key-values. Consequently, you must ensure that your use of key-values is compliant with the GDPR.

Including the TFUA parameter in an ad request takes precedence over any applicable site-level settings.

If the "Child-directed ads" setting is available in your UI, then the "Limit line item serving" setting for reservation line items only applies if we detect that the request is from a region subject to privacy legislation or if you have configured Ad Manager accordingly.*


* This setting allows for the selection of the types of ads that are permitted to serve to users in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the UK and other areas affected by privacy legislation.

If you're using Google's advertising services and would like to request restricted data processing treatment per COPPA at the site, subdomain, or app level, rather than per ad request, see Tag a site or app for child-directed treatment.

Learn more about TFCD and COPPA

The TFCD and TFUA tags should not both simultaneously be set to true. If they are, the TFCD tag takes precedence.

Google Publisher Tags (GPT)

The setTagForUnderAgeOfConsent GPT API call is no longer the recommended method for complying with privacy legislation.

If you're using Google Publisher Tag (GPT), you can mark an ad request as restricted data processing, compliant with GDPR, by updating your code. Omission of this setting defaults to allowing personalized ads.

Please refer to the GPT developer documentation for the latest code samples.

View the GPT developer documentation

GPT passbacks

Google Publisher Tag allows you to generate tags with “passback” functionality. This functionality can be implemented using a standard Google Publisher Tag written into an iframe.

View the GPT developer guide to passbacks

<amp-ad> tags

<amp-ad type="doubleclick"> supports marking requests for restricted data processing via the amp-consent component. That component allows the publisher to specify checkConsentHref, an endpoint that is queried before requests are sent from any component on the page that specifies the attribute data-block-on-consentRead more about amp-consent and the format of ConsentHref responses

If the publisher’s ConsentHref endpoint returns the keys "tfua" or "tfcd", subsequent Ad Manager requests will be marked for restricted data processing, respectively. For example, consider an AMP page with a consent component and an ad:

<amp-consent layout="nodisplay" id="consent-element">
<script type="application/json">
{ "consents":
   { "my-consent":
      {
         "checkConsentHref": "https://publisher.com/api/check-consent", "promptUI": "consent-ui"
      }
   }
}
</script>
</amp-consent>
<amp-ad data-block-on-consent width=320 height=50 type="doubleclick" data-slot="/4119129/mobile_ad_banner" json='{"targeting":{"sport":["rugby","cricket"]}, "categoryExclusions":["health"]}'></amp-ad>

The following response from the publisher’s ConsentHref (https://publisher.com/api/check-consent) would enable restricted data processing for the Ad Manager ad request:

{ "promptIfUnknown": false, "sharedData": { "doubleclick-tfua": 1, "doubleclick-tfcd": 0 } }

TFUA and TFCD can also be set statically on <amp-ad> tags using the targeting JSON object as follows, for example:

<amp-ad data-block-on-consent width=320 height=50 type="doubleclick" data-slot="/4119129/mobile_ad_banner" json='{"targeting":{"sport":["rugby","cricket"]}, "categoryExclusions":["health"], "tagForChildDirectedTreatment":1, "tagForUnderAgeTreatment":1}'> </amp-ad>

Finally, to help you comply with these requirements, note that data-block-on-consent can also be set for other AMP components that make requests to third parties, such as amp-analytics and amp-pixel.

Tagless Request

If you're using Tagless Request, you can mark an ad request as requiring restricted data processing by adding the tfua=[int] parameter directly to the tag request URL. We recommend you specify the parameter early in the tag to avoid any risk of truncation. Specify tfua=1 to mark the ad request as restricted data processing.

Omission of the parameter defaults to disabling restricted data processing and allowing personalized ads. 

For example:

https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=/12345/adunit&sz=728x90&tfua=1&c=12345

Ad Exchange Tags

If your page uses the asynchronous ad code (adsbygoogle.js) to request ads from the Ad Exchange (AdX), request ads suited for restricted data processing by including the parameter data-tag-for-under-age-of-consent="1" in every tag. For example:

<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"> </script> <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px" data-ad-client="ca-pub-0123456789abcdef" data-ad-slot="0123456789" data-tag-for-under-age-of-consent="1"></ins> <script> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); </script>

If you use the older synchronous ad tag (show_ads.js), then set the variable google_tag_for_under_age_of_consent=1 in every ad tag.  For example:

<script> google_ad_client = "ca-pub-0123456789abcdef"; google_ad_slot = "0123456789"; google_ad_width = 125; google_ad_height = 125; google_tag_for_under_age_of_consent = 1; </script> <script src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>

Google Mobile Ads SDK

As an app developer, you can indicate whether you want Google to treat your content as suited for restricted data processing when you make an ad request.

You can set tagForUnderAgeOfConsent to indicate a restricted data processing. Read the developer documentation for Android and iOS for more information.

Google Interactive Media Ads SDK (for Video)

On video requests, you can indicate that you want Google to treat your video content as suited for restricted data processing, when you append the tfua=1 parameter to your ad tag. You can do this with a manually constructed master video tag or using any of the platform-specific IMA SDKs (HTML5, iOS, or Android).

If your video player uses Ad Manager's Dynamic Ad Insertion feature, it can also include the tfua=1 parameter with a video on demand (VOD) or live stream request to pass the parameter to any included ad requests.

If both TFCD and TFUA parameters are set to 1, TFCD will take precedence.

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