Privacy and The Trade Desk Platform

This page is about the privacy practices on our Trade Desk Platform and the data, including personal data or personal information (“personal data”) it uses for delivering advertising. If you are interested in our corporate and website privacy policy, click here.

If you reside in the People’s Republic of China, click here for the China privacy policy.

Last updated: November 5, 2024

OVERVIEW

AT A GLANCE

FULL PRIVACY POLICY

THE PLATFORM

THE DATA THE PLATFORM COLLECTS AND PROCESSES

HOW THE PLATFORM COLLECTS DATA

COOKIES

THE PURPOSES FOR WHICH THE PLATFORM PROCESSES DATA

TARGETED ADVERTISING

PERSONALISATION AND INTERESTS

CALIFORNIA PRIVACY INFORMATION

DISCLOSURE AND TRANSFER

INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS

SECURITY AND DATA RETENTION

YOUR RIGHTS AND CHOICES

EUROPEAN UNION CONTROLLER/PROCESSOR DESIGNATION AND LEGAL BASES

CHANGES TO OUR POLICIES

CONTACT US

Aperçu

The Trade Desk offers what is known in the industry as a Demand Side Platform (“DSP” or “Platform”). We provide technology that helps advertisers and their advertising agencies manage digital advertising campaigns across many channels, such as websites, apps, audio, smart TVs, and other video. The advertising campaigns run by our clients help pay for the content you enjoy.

We, and our clients, collect and use data both to help ensure that the ads you see are relevant and to measure and report on their effectiveness.

Our Platform uses data to produce a mapping of devices that might be related to each other, meaning that they might be used by the same person or by people within the same household. This helps advertisers better target and measure their campaigns, as well as limiting the number of times the same person or household sees an ad.

Our references to our Platform in this policy only refer to the Trade Desk’s own advertising technology platform and do not include the technology or systems of clients or partners that use or integrate with us. Clients and partners are bound by our policies when they use our Platform.

The Trade Desk is a member in good standing of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI). The Trade Desk also follows the industry self-regulatory guidelines of the Digital Advertising Alliance, the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada, and the European Digital Advertising Alliance.

The Trade Desk also implements and adheres to the specifications and policies of the IAB EU Transparency & Consent Framework as part of our compliance with EU data protection law. The Trade Desk’s identification number within the Framework is 21. See https://iabeurope.eu/transparency-consent-framework/ for more information.

If you want to go directly to our Opt Out, please visit http://www.adsrvr.org.

At A Glance

Read below for a quick overview. See below for detailed information.

Who we are:

Global HQ: The Trade Desk, Inc. 42 N. Chestnut St Ventura, CA 93001 USA

EEA and Switzerland: The UK Trade Desk Ltd. 10th Floor, 1 Bartholomew Close London EC1A 7BL United Kingdom

What we do:

Advertising technology platform for managing digital advertising campaigns.

The data our Platform collects and processes:

Pseudonymous data such as:

  • unique cookie and device identifiers
  • mobile device advertising identifiers
  • Pseudonymous identifiers derived from email address or phone numbers, or device and connection information
  • IP addresses
  • web browsing history from advertising impressions we see
  • interest information inferred by us from web browsing history
  • interest information stored and/or used on the Platform by clients and partners
  • location information
  • browser and device type, version and settings
  • hashed email addresses, phone numbers and other identifying information (or information derived from such)

How the Platform collects data:

Some of the ways the Platform collects data include:

  • from partners sending us requests for ads on websites, mobile applications, smart televisions, video devices, and other media
  • using cookies and pixels
  • from clients and partners uploading data to our platform
  • from clients and partners using our technology to collect data
  • through the delivery of advertising

The purposes for which the Platform processes data:

The Platform processes data both on our behalf and on behalf of clients and partners for advertising purposes such as:

  • personalizing ads
  • delivering ads
  • limiting the number of times you see an ad
  • measuring effectiveness of ads
  • reporting on ad campaigns
  • maintaining ad transaction records
  • attributing purchases or other actions to ads
  • associating devices that might be related to each other
  • preventing malicious or invalid activity improving our Platform and the services we offer

Disclosure and transfer:

We disclose data to other parties such as:

  • clients and partners to help improve the effectiveness of their, and their clients’ advertising
  • service providers who perform certain services on our behalf
  • if we think it is required by law

In addition, much of the data collected on the Platform belongs to our clients and partners.

We may transfer data from the country of origin to the US or other countries. We do so under a valid legal framework.

We may also disclose personal data in response to lawful requests from public authorities, including to meet security or law enforcement requirements.

Security and Data Retention:

We maintain generally accepted security methods to protect data on the Platform.

We retain pseudonymous data up to 18 months before we aggregate it or remove pseudonymous identifers.

Your rights and choices:

You have rights and choices with respect to the personal data on the Platform. More detailed information is available below.

Full Privacy Policy

Below, we explain in detail the type of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use it, and how we disclose it, as well as the choices available to you. If, after reading this policy, you still have questions, please feel free to contact us.

THE PLATFORM

The Platform allows advertisers and advertising agencies to manage digital advertising campaigns. We operate as a Demand Side Platform; this means we represent the demand side of the digital advertising marketplace, in which advertisers and agencies with ads to display are the “demand” and publishers with space for such ads on web pages, apps, smart TVs and other digital properties are the “supply”.

Digital advertising uses identifiers and associated data to make ads more effective and to measure their effectiveness. Without identifiers, our advertiser clients wouldn’t know, for example, if a 100 ad views were the result of 100 different users that each saw an ad, or if one user saw the same ad 100 times. This information is crucial to advertisers. Without information like this, advertisers would pay publishers much less, forcing publishers to either show more ads or make users pay for their content.

Advertisers and their agencies collect and use data on the Platform in different ways. They may bring their own data to the Platform, collect data using the Platform, or remove their data from the Platform.

THE DATA THE PLATFORM COLLECTS AND PROCESSES

The Platform collects and processes pseudonymous data about users, households, devices, and ads and where they’re shown. This includes:

  • unique cookie identifiers
  • device advertising identifiers
  • Pseudonymous identifiers derived from email address or phone numbers, or device and connection information
  • IP addresses
  • Interest and demographic information stored and/or used on the Platform by clients and partners
  • Interest and demographic information we create or infer
  • other information about browsers and devices, such as type, version and settings
  • location information based on IP address or other types of information that may include precise geolocation information (i.e., latitude/longitude coordinates), if provided to us
  • information about ads that are shown, such as which ads are shown to a device or user, where (which web page or app) they are shown, and at what time
  • hashed email addresses and other identifying information (or information derived from such)

HOW THE PLATFORM COLLECTS DATA

The Platform receives data in several ways, including the following:

  • Advertisers and agencies may bring or collect their own information to our Platform (for example, that they collect on their own websites through the use of Platform technology) that we then store and use on their behalf to enhance their advertising campaigns.
  • Bid requests, which are sets of information that describe an ad space that is available to be filled. We get these requests from the “supply” side of the advertising ecosystem, meaning websites, apps, smart TVs, and others, as well as their agents. The requests contain information about the ad space, the device, and sometimes the user, including location information. They also usually have an ID (or IDs) that enables us to match the request with information we may already have.
  • Third-party suppliers of information used to target, optimize or measure advertising campaigns.
  • Purveyors of connected TV devices and apps can send us information about the video content viewed on the device or app.
  • Pixels and cookies, which allow us to recognize web browsers across sites and over time, and therefore to record information about them over time.
  • Mobile device IDs, which are made available through the device operating systems, like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, for purposes of allowing mobile apps and their advertising partners to recognize a device over time. We use these IDs in a similar way to the way we use cookies.
  • Mobile SDKs are bits of code that some of our partners enable to be placed in mobile apps. This enables our partners to send us data about the mobile app and device in association with the mobile device ID.
  • After an ad serves, our servers receive a network request from the device on which the ad was shown in order to confirm that the ad was delivered and provide information for us to measure the ad.


COOKIES

Cookies help us by enabling our ability to distinguish between, recognize, and store data about unique web browsers and devices, and to store data on our servers for the advertising purposes described here. Our cookie domain is adsrvr.org. The Trade Desk ID (TDID) is used to recognize web-browser profiles over time across sites. The TDID has a lifespan of 1 year from the time you last received an ad powered by Platform. This lifespan may be updated each time your browser encounters our Platform.

In order to be able to transmit requests for ads and other data about users or devices between sellers and buyers, and to help show you ads that match your likely interests, we engage in cookie syncing, meaning that we match our TDID to clients’ and partners’ cookie IDs. We also use a cookie to store a related opt-out choice, when users opt out of cookie based targeted advertising.

THE PURPOSES FOR WHICH THE PLATFORM PROCESSES DATA

The Platform processes data both on our own behalf and on behalf of clients and partners for purposes related to targeting, delivering, measuring and reporting on advertising.

  • Personalizing ads: We use data to increase advertising relevancy and effectiveness.
  • Ad delivery: We use data to enable the technical delivery of an ad and measure success of delivery.
  • Frequency and other reporting: We use a pseudonymous identifier to keep track of how many times an ad was shown, as well as where and when.
  • Measurement and analytics: We use an identifier to measure how well ads perform, such as whether users clicked on the ad or went to a client’s store after their ad campaign was shown.
  • Reporting: We may use a pseudonymous identifier to measure, attribute, and report on the performance and success of campaigns. This includes transaction reporting and verification.
  • Clicks and conversions: We may use a pseudonymous identifier to measure actions taken by a user with respect to a particular ad, i.e., a click on an ad, or a download of an app.
  • Attribution: We may use data to match particular ad views to subsequent actions taken by a user. For example, a clothing advertiser might be able to see that someone who saw an ad for gloves subsequently purchased the gloves. This would be done by stitching together the identifiers from the sites where the ad was served and where the online purchase was made.
  • Cross device graphing: We may use data and algorithms to associate pseudonymous identifiers that might be related to each other. Such a graph might link various identifiers present on a single device, various identifiers associated with an individual who has multiple devices or multiple device/individuals within the same household.
  • Detection of malicious or invalid activity: We process information in an attempt to prevent malicious activity or invalid ad traffic. This may include identifying and preventing purveyors of malware or bots that try to take advertising dollars for ads that aren’t shown to real users or that try to harm users’ devices.