• by Laurie Sullivan , July 9, 2025

The advertising ecosystem faces increased legal and regulatory challenges to keep up with change.

Updates made to the IAB Diligence Platform on Wednesday aim to help the digital advertising industry comply with evolving privacy regulations.

A new Online Tracking Questionnaire focuses on cookies, pixels, and other tracking technologies, as well as important updates to Data Supplier Questionnaire. 

Cookie scanning tools are important to comply with regulations, but they identify data outflows -- not what companies do with that data.

For this reason, the questionnaire will assess data collection, use, and configuration practices of technology partners whose tools are integrated into their digital platforms such as websites and mobile apps to remain compliant.

Safeguards have been put in place to surface key information about how these technologies interact with user data and how they can help identify potential risks before they become compliance issues. 

Michael Hahn, executive vice president and general counsel, IAB & IAB Tech Lab, told MediaPost that IAB Diligence Platform questionnaires are drafted and reviewed by the IAB and IAB Tech Lab’s Privacy Implementation and Accountability Task Force (PIAT). This working group meets monthly and comprises approximately 150 legal professionals and product managers from dozens of member companies. PIAT aims to develop legal and technology solutions for the digital advertising industry, including standardizing privacy diligence tools.

“New questionnaires are uploaded by Safeguard Privacy and pushed out to all IAB Diligence Platform subscribers for use in their third-party due diligence process,” Hahn wrote in an email. “The questionnaires are not automatically populated.”

He explained that subscribers must complete questionnaires based on their organization’s practices.

A Data Supplier Questionnaire also has been added to reflect the latest takeaways from the FTC enforcement actions in Mobilewalla and Gravy Analytics.

This questionnaire is for data suppliers who sell or share personal data with other entities in digital advertising, and cover upstream and downstream data handling practices, helping folks understand not just how suppliers use data, but also how they managing their own data relationships.

As part of updating the IAB Diligence Platform, the group is designing new modules covering data clean rooms (DCR) and social media.

The Social Media module will look at the use of personal information in the context of advertising on social media platforms.