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Glossary / Usercentrics terms

Updated

In many of our articles we use a lot of terms and abbreviations that you may not be familiar with. To ensure that you know what we're talking about when we throw around industry terms and acronyms, we've created this article.

 

Usercentrics CMP terms

Admin interface
This is the Usercentrics CMP backend. Here you can administer your account settings, the data processing services you use, your banner configuration, etc.
Everything that is related to your Usercentrics CMP account can be found here.
Configuration
A configuration describes one Consent Management Platform (CMP) setup. If you’re running multiple websites with different data processing services, you may wish to use one configuration per domain. Other use cases could be different configurations for different legal frameworks (e.g. GDPR, TCF, CCPA).
Consent ID
This ID identifies a specific consent decision of the user for a processing service - i.e. a kind of consent document.
For example, If the user rejects Google Analytics a unique Consent ID is assigned to this decision.
The Consent ID is the result of the Controller ID, Processor ID and Settings ID.
Controller ID
This is a random unique ID that is assigned to a user's device on a first visit and is stored on the device itself.
This ID is used to assign consent data to a user across multiple devices.
Cross-domain Consent Sharing
Functionality that allows a visitor to consent to the use of trackers for multiple domains at once. Consent submitted on one domain carries over to the other domains.
This is particularly useful for websites that redirect to a sub domain to perform for example bookings, or purchases, where displaying the banner anew would negatively impact user experience.
Privacy Trigger
A small button that is displayed after consent has been submitted, which allows a visitor to review their settings and update them if they so desire.
Settings ID
The Settings-ID is a unique identifier of a specific Consent Management Platform. It’s used in the Usercentrics script that you’ll implement on your website. Our system will use the Settings-ID to define exactly how your specific CMP should look like and behave.
Template ID
This is an ID associated with a specific data processing service (e.g. Google Analytics) for which a user can give consent or opt-out.

Legislations

APPI

The Act on the Protection of Personal Information is Japan's primary data protection law.
APPI is a set of rules for how businesses in Japan must handle your personal information.

CCPA

The California Consumer Privacy Act is a state statute intended to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California, United States.

CPA

The Colorado Privacy Act grants Colorado Consumers new rights with respect to their personal data, including the right to access, delete, and correct their personal data as well as the right to opt out of the sale of their personal data or its use for targeted advertising or certain kinds of profiling.

CPRA

The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, also known as Proposition 24, is a California ballot proposition that was approved by a majority of voters after appearing on the ballot for the general election on November 3, 2020.

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation is a Regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area. The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in particular Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

CTDPA

The Connecticut Data Privacy Act gives Connecticut residents certain rights over their personal data and establishes responsibilities and privacy protection standards for data controllers that process personal data.
It protects a Connecticut resident acting in an individual or household context, such as browsing the Internet or making a purchase at a store.

DMA

The Digital Markets Act is an EU regulation that aims to make the digital economy fairer and more contestable. The regulation entered into force on 1 November 2022 and became applicable, for the most part, on 2 May 2023.

The DMA aims at ensuring a higher degree of competition in European digital markets by preventing large companies from abusing their market power and by allowing new players to enter the market. This regulation targets the largest digital platforms operating in the European Union, referred to as "gatekeepers" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft) due to the "durable" market position in some digital sectors and because they also meet certain criteria related to the number of users, their turnovers, or capitalization. These companies had until 6 March 2024 to comply with all of the Act's provisions.

FADP

The Federal Act on Data Protection in Switzerland provide for protection against infringements of personality rights (data privacy) through excessive use of personal data. The FADP's jurisdiction is based on the principle of effects, which means it applies to the processing of personal data that has actual or potential consequences for individuals in Switzerland. 
This includes processing activities that take place outside of Switzerland but still have an impact on the privacy rights of people in Switzerland.

LGPD

Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (The General Personal Data Protection Law), is a statutory law on data protection and privacy in the Federative Republic of Brazil. The law's primary aim is to unify 40 different Brazilian laws that regulate the processing of personal data.

PDPA

The Personal Data Protection Act is a law in Singapore that governs the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data in the private sector.

PIPEDA

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act is a Canadian law relating to data privacy. It governs how private sector organizations collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial business.

POPIA

The Protection of Personal Information Act is a piece of legislation which governs the law of data protection and privacy in South Africa.

UCPA

The Utah Consumer Privacy Act is designed to protect consumer privacy while providing a clear framework for businesses operating in Utah​.
It establishes the rights of Utah consumers over their personal data and outlines the responsibilities of businesses in handling such data.

VCDPA

The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act gives consumers the right to access their personal data and request that it be deleted by businesses. It also requires companies to conduct data protection assessments related to processing personal data for targeted advertising and sales purposes.

Programming Language terms

AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source HTML framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. It was originally created by Google as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. AMP is optimized for mobile web browsing and intended to help webpages load faster.
API
An Application Programming Interface is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build or use such a connection or interface is called an API specification.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets: a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
CSV
A Comma-Separated Values file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format.
DOM
The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree.
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays. It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with servers.
PHP
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group.
RegEx
A Regular Expression is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation.
SDK
A Software Development Kit is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific to a hardware platform and operating system combination.
UI
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a User interface is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur.
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
XSLT
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG.

Internet terms

CMS

A Content Management System is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. A CMS is typically used for enterprise content management and web content management.

CSP

A Content Security Policy is a computer security standard introduced to prevent cross-site scripting, clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context.

HTTP

The HyperText Transfer Protocol is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.

HTTPS

The HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer.

IP address

An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification and location addressing.

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer is an encryption security protocol. 
Transport Layer Security, or TLS, has replaced SSL.

 
TLS

Transport Layer Security is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securing HTTPS remains the most publicly visible.

URL

A Uniform Resource Locator, colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier, although many people use the two terms interchangeably.

Privacy terms

Adequate countries

Countries outside the European Union which the European Commission determined offers an adequate level of data protection.

CJEU

The Court of Justice of the European Union is the judicial branch of the European Union. Seated in the Kirchberg quarter of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, this EU institution consists of two separate courts: the Court of Justice and the General Court. From 2005 to 2016 it also contained the Civil Service Tribunal.

CMP

A Consent Management Platform is a system or process for allowing customers to determine what personal data they are willing to share with a business. It has become so important worldwide because of the lawful requirement for websites to obtain user consent for collecting data through cookies while browsing.

DPA

A Data Processing Agreement is an agreement between a data controller (such as a company) and a data processor (such as a third-party service provider). It regulates any personal data processing conducted for business purposes. A DPA may also be called a GDPR data processing agreement.

DPO

A Data Protection Officer ensures, in an independent manner, that an organization applies the laws protecting individuals' personal data. The designation, position and tasks of a DPO within an organization are described in Articles 37, 38 and 39 of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.

DPS

Data Processing Services are a suite of operations that systematically convert raw data into meaningful information. Such data doesn't only come from surveys or manual user input, but is generated every time a user interacts with digital media. 
Well-known examples of data processing services are technologies such as reCAPTCHA, PayPal, YouTube, Facebook, or Google technologies such as Google Ads.

EDPB

The European Data Protection Board is a European Union independent body with juridical personality whose purpose is to ensure consistent application of the General Data Protection Regulation and to promote cooperation among the EU’s data protection authorities.

ePR

The ePrivacy Regulation is a proposal for the regulation of various privacy-related topics, mostly in relation to electronic communications within the European Union.

Explicit consent

The consent dialog keeps surfacing on every page until the website visitor has submitted their consent settings.

Implied consent

Website visitors ignoring the consent dialog automatically consents to all cookies by continued use of the website.

PII

Personal Identifiable Information is a legal term pertaining to information security environments. While PII has several formal definitions, generally speaking, it is information that can be used by organizations on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context.

Prior Consent

No unnecessary tracking may occur before a visitor has given consent.

"Prior consent enabled" refers to whether or not a tracker is disabled if a visitor hasn't consent to its use.

Economical terms

IBAN
The International Bank Account Number is an internationally agreed system of identifying bank accounts across national borders to facilitate the communication and processing of cross border transactions with a reduced risk of transcription errors.
MOSS
There are two schemes within the Mini One Stop Shop scheme: 
  • The Union scheme for taxable persons that have an establishment within the EU but are making supplies to one or more Member States in which they are not established.
  • The non-Union scheme for taxable persons that have no establishment within the EU.

The Union scheme simplifies VAT obligations for businesses selling goods and services cross-border to final consumers in the EU. Once registered for the Union scheme, a taxable person can: declare and pay EU VAT due on supplies made under the scheme in a single electronic quarterly return.

MRR
Monthly Recurring Revenue is the predictable total revenue generated by your business from all the active subscriptions in a particular month. It includes recurring charges from discounts, coupons, and recurring add-ons, but excludes one-time fees
VAT
Value-Added Tax is known in some countries as a goods and services tax, is a type of tax that is assessed incrementally. It is levied on the price of a product or service at each stage of production, distribution, or sale to the end consumer.

General terms

EU
The European Union is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe.
FAQ
A Frequently Asked Questions list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps.
GTM
Google Tag Manager is a system that allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes and related code fragments collectively known as "tags" on your website or mobile app.
IAB
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is an American advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry.
ISO
The International Organization for Standardization is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies. ISO is a nongovernmental organization that comprises standards bodies from more than 160 countries, with one standards body representing each member country.
NOYB
An abbreviation for "None Of Your Business" is a European is a non-profit organization for digital rights based in Vienna, Austria established in 2017 with a pan-European focus.
PDF
Portable Document Format, standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.
TCF
The Transparency & Consent Framework is an open-standard technical framework that enables websites, advertisers and ad agencies to obtain, record, and update consumer consent for web pages.
US
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America.
UTC
Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about one second of mean solar time at 0° longitude and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time.
WCAG
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the Internet.
WYSIWYG
An acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.