Is PPC Protect GDPR compliant?

What does PPC Protect do?

Click-fraud protection that fingerprints each visitor to judge whether an advertising click was genuine. The fingerprint serves the advertiser's budget, not the visitor's use of the site, so consent is required.

Does PPC Protect need consent?

Yes. PPC Protect is Analytics, which is never strictly necessary for a website to function. Under ePrivacy Article 5(3), and its national transpositions, storing or reading anything on the device for that purpose requires consent first, and that consent has to be as easy to refuse as it is to give.

ePrivacy Art. 5(3) · TDDDG § 25 (DE) · TKG 2021 § 165(3) (AT) · GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)

Does PPC Protect send data outside the EEA?

Yes. PPC Protect processes data outside the European Economic Area, so you need a transfer mechanism under Chapter V and you have to say so in your privacy policy. In practice this means standard contractual clauses, or a provider certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

GDPR Art. 44 · GDPR Art. 46

How do we detect PPC Protect?

We load your page in a real browser as a first-time visitor who clicks nothing, then look at what it contacted. PPC Protect is recognised by requests to ppcprotect.com and mplat-ppcprotect.com, and we report whether it merely loaded or actually sent data, and whether it set a cookie before any choice was made.