What’s everyone planning for the introduction of the new European GDPR laws on May 28th regarding having to request permission to store and retain personal information and serve banner adverts? Apparently without the express permission of the end user games or other apps cannot serve banner adverts plus the game (or creator) must securely store the user data and securely dispose of individual user data if requested to do so.
Essentially this new law seems to apply to every developer who owns an app. Developers may need to supply consent functionality for the end user to opt in to, plus store and manage that data that they neither want nor benefit from - and let’s be honest, which user wants to opt in to having adverts in their games? There’s a lot up in the air regarding this at the moment but the general consensus seems to be that if after the 28th May your app(s) don’t comply with this law then you’re contravening EU law. Don’t think that it concerns you because you’re based or live outside of the EU? Wrong - if a European accesses your app outside of the EU they’re still protected by EU law and so you can’t simply switch your app off for EU users (why would you want to anyway?).
The simplest solution is to switch off your ads completely and opt for a payed app model. This however will see those relying on banner ads for income’s profits plummet. It may also see the profits of Google’s admob service plummet too - Google have been very sketchy on how they plan to handle this, they’ve made some noises regarding a revised SDK to help developers but as of yet there’s been nothing concrete, which is odd as they seem to lose billions if their claims that they pay devs billions via Admob each year are to be believed. Big losses could also happen for larger dev houses such as Ketcapp and Voodoo who stuff all of their hypercasual apps with banner ads.
Anyone got any thoughts on this?