Privacy consent and data APIs

Unity Ads provides built-in solutions for acquiring user consent to data collection and processing, as well as developer APIs for passing a flag if you want to implement your own consent flow. Unity offers two options for privacy consent that can be adjusted by your Unity contact:

  1. Unity consent, which requires the user to explicitly agree to using their data for the personalized ads as well as project personalization and measurement. This is the default setting for all developers.
  2. Developer consent, which allows a developer to use their own or a third-party consent API to collect and manage user consent. This setting must be enabled by your Unity contact.

If you enable developer consent through your Unity contact, this information must be provided upon initialization and in totality per the region of the impression and user. If any required consent for a region is not provided, Unity will capture consent from the user using our default consent mechanism.

Example: If a user is in the European Economic Area (EEA), which requires GDPR consent, and you have chosen developer consent as your privacy consent option but do not provide an explicit true/false value by using Unity’s MetaData API, Unity will display our own GDPR Unity Consent mechanism.

Some regions might require consent to collect personal data by law, most notably under GDPR and PIPL regulations, and others might require end-user notice and the opportunity to opt-out, most notably under CCPA regulations. However, consent and opt-out requirements extend beyond these use cases and should be applied in any region that requires it. By using these APIs as opposed to using Unity’s consent option, you are taking responsibility for providing this consent correctly and for all regions. You cannot set different privacy consent settings for different regions.

Typically when a user does not consent to, or opts out of data collection and processing under a privacy regulation (for example GDPR, CCPA, or PIPL), this will limit the data available about your users and will likely impact your revenue.

Note: Developers are not required to implement their own consent, but enabling developer consent and providing us the correct values as per our documentation ensures that the Unity consent will never appear for the configured game.

In this section, you will find the API classes that allow you, the developer, to provide consent statuses for your users.

What's covered

Tip: For information on complying with Apple's App Tracking Transparency, refer to the iOS 14 technical integration documentation.