Quick Tip: Implement the new Google AdMob / Adsense Cookie Policy

In the last days Google sent out emails to App developers which uses their AdSense and AdMob frameworks. Google urges them to inform their users about the usage of the advertising cookies:

From Google:

European laws require that digital publishers give visitors to their sites and apps information about their use of cookies and other forms of local storage. In many cases these laws also require that consent be obtained.

In this tutorial I'll show how you can implement an information alert about the cookie usage in SWIFT. The basic idea is to detect, if the app is started the first time:

If yes show an alert with a message about the cookie usage.
After clicking 'OK' store a key in NSUserDefault.
Next time the application is started, this key will be found and therefore no alert will be shown.

IMPORTANT: I'm not a lawyer. So no guarantees. You have to decide on your own if this is sufficient.

AdMob Cookie Usage

The Code snippet for showing the AdMob Cookie usage is simple:

// AdMob Cookie handling:

// Warning: I'm not a lawyer. You have to decide on your own, if this is sufficient

// Google gives more hints on: http://www.cookiechoices.org

let adMobTitle = "Cookie usage:"

let adMobCookieText = "We use device identifiers to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share such identifiers and other information from your device with our social media, advertising and analytics partners."

let userDefaults : NSUserDefaults = NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults()

if !userDefaults.boolForKey("termsAccepted") {

   var alert = UIAlertController(title: adMobTitle, message: adMobCookieText, preferredStyle: UIAlertControllerStyle.Alert)

   alert.addAction(UIAlertAction(title: "OK", style: UIAlertActionStyle.Default)  { _ in

       userDefaults.setBool(true, forKey: "termsAccepted")

})

   presentingViewController.presentViewController(alert, animated: true, completion: nil)

}

I've also updated the sample code in my GitHub repository from the iAd & AdMob tutorial.

Google gives more details and shows how to implement this in ObjectiveC at http://www.cookiechoices.org. Further details about the Google AdMob SDK can be found here.

That's all for today.

Cheers,
Stefan