We live in a world whereusers have little to no say in how their personal data is shared, managed, and used.All user data is currently still owned by organizations,but with the changing legal landscape of Consumer Data Privacy Laws like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), CCPA(California Consumer Privacy Act) and other State level laws related to User Data Privacy, users are finally gaining control. These laws and policies are meant tokeep the organizations in check and move to a model where individual users will be able to regulate how their data is used. We’re seeing an increase in the number of regulations supporting an individual’s rights to privacy. According to a recent study done by Gartner, close to 65% of the world’s population will have modern privacy regulations protecting their personal data by 2023.
Companies like Apple and Google are making massive changes to their privacy policies and settings that have limited the capability for companies to track users and have enabled users to opt-out of data sharing.
In 2020, Apple took a bold step and blocked all 3rd Party cookies commonly known as cross-site tracking cookies, Google is said to drop all support of 3rd Party cookies by mid 2023. This was by far one of the biggest blows to online data collection, digital advertising, and marketing. According Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report 2022, 81% of companies completely or substantially rely on 3rd Party cookies. 3rd Party cookies are critical for organizations to track, target, re-target, and personalize experiences for consumers. By switching off the support of 3rd Party cookies, Apple killed the business model of many ad companies, wiping out more than $10 million in Annual revenue.
One year later, April 2021, Apple updated its iOS so that users have to opt-in to allowing ad-tracking by social media apps like Meta and Twitter, rather than the prior practice of having to opt-out. These changes resulted in a cumulative $315 billion being wiped out from the market share of Meta, Snap, Twitter & Pinterest.
With the changing legal landscape of Privacy policies and the death of 3rd Party cookies, organizations are now forced to find new ways to gain user data and target their audiences. This will require a huge shift in strategies, marketing budgets and understanding of the cookie-less world.
What does the future look like?
The future is consented 1st Party data. The organizations that invest today in gaining consented 1st Party user data will reap the long-term benefits.
All organizations need to be completely transparent while collecting user data and need to explicitly show users how their personal data is going to be used (personalization, marketing, advertising, analytics etc.) and further give users granular controls to turn off data usage and sharing at will.
Organization will also need to re-think how they routinely acquire user data (specially PII – Personally Identifiable Information) from other organizations with user consent baked in. This is probably going to be one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for companies to take on this daunting task. For organizations to be truly compliant they would need to adhere to user privacy laws and keep user actions and controls on the forefront, so anytime a user changes their sharing permissions all downstream systems would need to honor those decisions.
Let’s take “Signup with Google” as an example, which is currently used by thousands if not millions of apps to create user profiles and reduce friction for end users, but downstream after a user enables this on signup they have limited to no knowledge as to how the app is using their personal information. They have no control to turn-off the data sharing on that App directly. Where does the liability lie? Is it with Google or the downstream app? Well, the answer is not that simple, it must be a shared responsibility that has to be baked into a data sharing contract that shows where the liability lies and what is the action pending to honor the user’s data sharing actions. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to build trust and increase customer loyalty which will further help organizations build deeper relationships with their users.
Trust, Consent and Privacy-firstmustpart every organization’s core mission to instill trust in their users. I see a future where all organizations need to play by these new rules to thrive otherwise, they will eventually see a decrease in digital engagement, conversion, and revenue.
