What ironSource means for your app's privacy disclosures

ironSource is an ad network from Unity. What it involves, whether it needs the tracking prompt, what goes on the App Store labels and the Play Data safety form, and the rejection it is usually behind.

Updated 2026-09-18 · Written from the same rules terms.gg uses to generate documents

What ironSource actually does

Another mediation platform, now part of Unity, common in games that monetise with rewarded video.

What its job necessarily involves

These follow from what the thing is for, so they are true whichever version you installed:

• Device identifiers passed on to each network in the mediation stack.
• Reward and engagement events, which is what rewarded video is sold on.

What to open and check in ironSource

The settings below decide what the honest answer on the forms is, and they are specific to this SDK rather than to its category:

• The mediation network list, which is the real recipient list.
• Whether consent is set before the first initialisation call.

ironSource needs the tracking prompt

ironSource is ad network, so App Tracking Transparency applies. It reads the advertising identifier and measures across apps that other companies own. Ship without the prompt and the app is rejected; ship with the prompt and ignore the answer, which some SDKs still do by default, and you have a problem larger than a rejection.

ironSource in Europe: nothing may run before consent

This is the part that gets missed, because the natural place to initialise an SDK is the moment the app launches, and the natural place to ask for consent is a screen that appears after it. Reading or writing anything on the device for ad network needs agreement first, and that comes from the ePrivacy rules rather than the GDPR, so picking a different legal basis does not get you past it.

ironSource in California: this counts as selling or sharing

California reads "sell or share" far more widely than money changing hands. Handing an identifier to ad network so someone can be advertised to elsewhere is caught, and no payment has to occur for it to count.

ironSource on the App Store privacy labels

Apple asks what your app collects, and your app collects whatever its SDKs collect. ironSource is generally declared under Third-Party Advertising, alongside whatever the rest of your app does for its own reasons.

ironSource on the Google Play Data safety form

The form asks two things the labels do not: whether data is shared with anyone else, and whether it is encrypted in transit. For this SDK the sharing answer is yes, and answering no is a false declaration rather than an oversight.

Check Unity's own privacy manifest for ironSource

Since 2024 Apple has required third-party SDKs on its list to ship a signed privacy manifest declaring what they collect and which sensitive APIs they use, and your app's combined manifest is built from them. That file is the authoritative answer for ironSource, it comes from Unity, and it changes when they ship.

The rejection ironSource is usually behind

The Data safety form declares no sharing, while the mediation stack is by definition sharing.

What to put in the privacy policy about ironSource

• Unity named as a processor or a recipient, not hidden behind "our partners".
• What it is for, in a sentence someone would understand without knowing what an SDK is.
• Where it runs, and what makes a transfer outside your region lawful.
• How long the data is kept, which is a question the vendor documents and most policies skip.
• That data goes to advertising, said plainly, with the California opt-out route.

Keeping it true after launch

A legal page stops being true the moment the product moves past it, usually by adding a payment provider, an analytics SDK or a sign-in. No store re-checks your pages against your build, so the drift is yours to notice.

• Re-read it whenever you add a dependency that sees user data.
• Re-check what loads on the page after any change: the cookie notice and the policy have to agree.
• Keep the URL stable. Changing where a policy lives breaks every listing that points at it.