What Unity Ads means for your app's privacy disclosures
Unity Ads is an ad network. 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.
What Unity Ads actually does
The ad network built into the Unity engine, which means a lot of games ship it without a separate decision.
What its job necessarily involves
These follow from what the thing is for, so they are true whichever version you installed:
- A device identifier for frequency capping and attribution.
- Gameplay signals used to decide which ad is worth showing.
What to open and check in Unity Ads
The settings below decide what the honest answer on the forms is, and they are specific to this SDK rather than to its category:
- Whether the engine's own data collection is on, separately from the ad SDK.
- What is passed through the privacy consent metadata at initialisation.
Unity Ads needs the tracking prompt
Unity Ads 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.
Unity Ads 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.
Unity Ads 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.
Unity Ads on the App Store privacy labels
Apple asks what your app collects, and your app collects whatever its SDKs collect. Unity Ads is generally declared under Third-Party Advertising, alongside whatever the rest of your app does for its own reasons.
Unity Ads 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 Unity Ads
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 Unity Ads, it comes from Unity, and it changes when they ship.
The rejection Unity Ads is usually behind
A game submitted as "no data collected" because the developer never installed anything: the engine came with it.
What to put in the privacy policy about Unity Ads
- 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.
Common questions
Do I need a privacy policy just because I use Unity Ads?
Yes, and you needed one anyway. Both stores ask for the URL before a listing goes live, whatever the app does. The SDK changes what the policy has to say, not whether you need one.
Can I skip the tracking prompt if I turn off personalised ads?
Turning off personalisation is not the same as not tracking. The prompt is about accessing the identifier and linking data with other companies, so check what the SDK still does with non-personalised ads before deciding.
Does removing the SDK fix a rejection?
Usually yes and it is the fastest route, but only if you also correct the labels and the form. Reviewers compare what you declared against what the binary contains, and a stale declaration fails on its own.