Prebid.org Privacy Policy

Last updated Aug 5, 2020

Prebid.org, Inc. respects your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information about you, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. This Privacy Notice applies to personal information that we collect through our website at prebid.org and its subdomains (“Website”) and via our marketing activities and events.
This Privacy Notice does not apply to any information collected by third parties using our open source software.

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Privacy Notice.

We recommend that you read this Privacy Notice in full to ensure you are fully informed. However, if you only want to access a particular section of this Privacy Notice, then you can click on the relevant link below to jump to that section.

What does Prebid.org do?

Prebid.org is an industry consortium that provides free and open source solutions to implement header bidding. We’re utilized globally and headquartered in the United States. We seek to ensure and promote fair, transparent, and efficient header bidding across the ad tech industry, representing all parts of the programmatic ecosystem, from ad tech vendors to publishers and others.

The open source software products we make available may be utilized by third parties for the purposes of serving online advertisements. These third parties may configure the software to enable pseudonymized data included in bid requests to be transmitted within the online advertising ecosystem. However, Prebid.org has no involvement in these transactions and does not itself transmit, store or otherwise process the pseudonymized data in these transactions.  Prebid.org is not responsible for the privacy practices of third parties that use our software and it is the responsibility of the third party concerned to handle data in accordance with applicable privacy laws. 

For more information about Prebid.org, please see the “About” section of our Website at prebid.org/overview/what-is-prebid-org.html.

What personal information does Prebid.org collect and why?

The personal information that we may collect from our Website or through our marketing activities broadly falls into the following categories:

Information that you provide voluntarily

Certain parts of our Website may ask you to provide personal information voluntarily: for example, we may ask you to provide your name and contact details in order to download files or code from us, sign up for an email newsletter, register for or attend one of our events, contribute code, and/or to submit enquiries or emails to us. When you submit code to us, we may ask you to sign our Code Contributor Licensing Agreement. If you are contributing code on behalf of your employer, then we may ask your employer to sign a similar agreement too.

Our Website also includes links to third party sites such as GitHub, Stack, Slack, Reddit, Quora and Twitter to enable you to submit questions and requests to us on those third party sites if you so choose; for example, by using certain tags or by following our profiles on those sites.

From time-to-time, Prebid.org may also host events, online or offline, and invite people to register for these events.

The personal information we collect may include contact information (such as your name and email address), professional information (such as your company name, job title, department or role), other identifying information such as your GitHub handle, as well as the nature of your request or communication to us.

Aside from this, the personal information that you are asked to provide, and the reasons why you are asked to provide it, will be made clear to you at the point we ask you to provide your personal information.

Information that we collect automatically

When you visit our Website, we may collect certain information automatically from your device. In some countries, including countries in the European Economic Area, this information may be considered personal information under applicable data protection laws.

Specifically, the information we collect automatically may include information like your IP address, device type, unique device identification numbers, browser-type, broad geographic location (e.g. country or city-level location) and other technical information. We may also collect information about how your device has interacted with our Website, including the pages accessed and links clicked.

Collecting this information enables us to better understand the visitors who come to our Website, where they come from, and what content on our Website is of interest to them. We use this information for our internal analytics purposes and to improve the quality and relevance of our Website to our visitors.

Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technology, as explained further in our Cookies Notice.

Who does Prebid.org share my personal information with?

We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients:

  • to our third party services providers and partners who provide data processing services to us (for example, to support the delivery of, provide functionality on, or help to enhance the security of our Website or email newsletters), or who otherwise process personal information for purposes that are described in this Privacy Notice or notified to you when we collect your personal information.

  • to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;

  • to an actual or potential buyer (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any actual or proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your personal information only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Notice;

  • to any other person with your consent to the disclosure.

If you are a visitor from the European Economic Area, our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.

However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, (ii) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights, or (iii) where we have your consent to do so. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information).

If we collect and use your personal information in support of our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), such legitimate interests include the provision and improvement of our technology and services to ensure and promote fair, transparent, and efficient header bidding across the ad tech industry, to maintain the quality and security of our Website, to carry out marketing, and to respond to communications and requests. If the legitimate interests we rely on fall outside the purposes set out in this Notice, we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.

Third-Party Websites

This Notice only applies to the Prebid.org Website. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or disclosures of third party websites which may be linked from our Website. Any access to and use of such linked websites is governed by the privacy policies of those third parties. We are not responsible for the information practices of such third parties.

How does Prebid.org keep my personal information secure?

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process about you. The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing your personal information.

International data transfers

Your personal information may be transferred to, and processed in, countries other than the country in which you are resident. We are headquartered in the US, and our member companies and third party service providers and partners operate around the world. Therefore, when we collect your personal information, we may process it in countries that have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country and in some cases, may not be as protective.

We will take appropriate safeguards to ensure that your personal information will remain protected in accordance with this Privacy Notice, including signing standard contractual clauses with our third party service providers. Further details can be provided upon request – please write to us using the contact details further below.

Data retention

We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal requirements).

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

Your data protection rights

If you are a resident of the European Economic Area or California, you have the right to request to access or request deletion of your personal information. You may exercise this right at any time by using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.

In addition, if you are a resident of the European Economic Area, you have the following additional data protection rights:

  • You may object to processing of your personal information, ask us to restrict processing of your personal information or request portability or correction of your personal information. Again, you can exercise these rights by contacting us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
  • If we have collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
  • You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. Contact details for data protection authorities in the European Economic Area are available here.

Everyone has the right to opt-out of marketing communications we send you at any time. You can exercise this right by clicking on the “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” link in the marketing e-mails we send you. Alternatively, you can opt out by using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.

We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Additional information for California residents

If you are a California resident, please review the following additional privacy disclosures under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”).

You have the right to understand how we collect, use, and disclose your personal information, to access your information, to request that we delete certain information, and to not be discriminated against for exercising your privacy rights. You may exercise these rights as described in the “Your data protection rights” section above.

You also have the right to understand what information we collect, for what purpose, and how we disclose personal information to third parties. As described in the What personal information does Prebid.org collect and why? section, we collect the categories of personal information listed below, and we use and disclose these categories of information for the business purposes described in that section. The categories are:

  • Identifiers, like your name, email address, IP address, device ID, cookie ID, and other similar identifiers.
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information, such as the usage data we receive when you access or use our Website. This includes information about your interactions with the Website and about the devices and computers you use to access the Website.
  • Professional or employment related information, including any information (like your name, email address, or similar information) that you provide about your employment or employer.
  • Other information that you choose to provide.

We share these categories of personal information as described in the Who does Prebid.org share my personal information with? section. We never sell the personal information we collect.

Updates to this Privacy Notice

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make. We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes if and where this is required by applicable data protection laws.

You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Privacy Notice.

How to contact us

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, please contact privacy@prebid.org.

The data controller of your personal information is Prebid.org, Inc.