• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, July 7, 2023

The IAB Tech Lab has released the finalized first version of its guidance and recommended practices for data clean rooms (DCRs) for advertisers and publishers.

The organization also released an Open Private Join and Activation (OPJA) protocol providing directions for matching encrypted audiences, as well as use cases for DCRs.

The purpose of both is to accelerate adoption of clean rooms for secure audience matching and attribution by guiding companies through the steps and answering their questions. The two are designed to “work in tandem to provide guidance to buyers and sellers choosing DCR solutions and to enable vendors to build standardized and interoperable private audience activation features,” according to IAB Lab.

“As the use of DCRs matures, it is necessary for the industry to come to consensus on how DCRs operate, develop a collection of canonical use cases and standards for interoperability among the participants engaging in a DCR,” the organization notes in its overview of the documents.

The DCR guidelines and OPJA  specification, initially published in February for feedback, have been given some updates as a result.  

Although they are not formal industry standards, they aim to establish common principles, functions and privacy-enhancing technologies for DCRs and outline “some limitations and guardrails” for DCRs. Among other things, they spell out implementation basics to help participants avoid exposing data through error or actual fraud.

The OPJA has been designed to be interoperable with IAB’s Ads.cert standard, which creates cryptographic keys that prevent ad-tech intermediaries from using unverified data or tampering with bid requests.