Increasing data privacy standards have made it difficult for brands to collect, use, and share their consumer data in a compliant way. But being able to do this is essential to create personalized content customers expect. Your customer data platform (CDP) can ensure data privacy and take the pain out of staying compliant.
With technological advances coming at every industry hard and fast, it’s getting increasingly complicated for businesses to ensure they’re staying compliant when it comes to data privacy. This is particularly true for the rise in use of AI systems, which present a number of new security challenges due to their reliance on third-party relationships and difficulties around integration into existing data security architecture.
The impact? Ensuring compliance when it comes to extensive stores of customer data is made needlessly complex. User privacy laws and strict data privacy standards have made it difficult for brands to collect, use, and share their consumer data in a compliant way. But being able to do this is essential in developing and streamlining CX, and businesses must not settle for confusing manual processes and wading through legal jargon to make decisions.
Instead, your customer data platform (CDP) can take the pain out of staying compliant. Let’s take a look at how.
You're probably already aware of many of the benefits of CDPs when it comes to data consolidation and sparking new insight, but fewer people know how crucial they are for achieving data compliance.
From the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), every business is regulated to ensure it keeps their customers’ data safe – and a good CDP is the fastest way to take a more proactive approach to meeting these requirements. By enabling you to configure compliance specifications to meet your unique needs as a business, CDPs give your engineering teams more control over business-critical functions. This then reduces time to iterate new privacy measures, making your organisation more agile across the board.
In a nutshell, it works by automatically detecting and classifying personally identifiable information (PII), then blocking access to this data according to your business’s privacy policy.
What counts as PII varies around the world and from industry to industry. It can even be dependent on the use case – for example, IP addresses may or may not be considered PII depending on what other information you store them with. But a good CDP will make it clear which data needs to be managed as PII, with the appropriate security controls for the risk associated with that type of information.
Alongside this, making it easier to maintain an updated inventory of data plays a key role in keeping compliance simple. In just a few clicks, your engineering team will know what information is stored where, who has access to it, and the details of any transformation since initial input – all with no manual input required. This helps to regulate internal access to sensitive or high-risk data such as PII, with the ability to encrypt your most precious data as and when the need for an added layer of protection arises.
Not all CDPs are built equal, and some may not provide the level of security your business requires. Look for a CDP that can offer:
Data encryption abilities: Significantly reduce the risk of cybercrime by ensuring that unwanted users have zero access to your client data through turning it into ciphertext that’s unreadable without the right key.
Permission and user controls to prevent unauthorised access: Never worry that a team has intercepted information they aren’t legally meant to see ever again. With a good CDP, you can segment access both by the team and on an individual level.
Integration capabilities: The right CDP should slot neatly into your existing system, with integration tools to make the transition simple and seamless.
User rights management (e.g. handle requests for data deletion): Whether you’re dealing with a sudden change of staff, or a shift in regulation that means your settings need to adapt , any decent CDP will make it easy and fast for your engineers to adjust user rights on the fly.
So, we’ve explored how a CDP can help in principle, but what should you be doing in practice? Once you’ve found the right CDP for you, we recommend these three steps as your initial roadmap to making data security simple:
Still using manual surveys and inventories? It’s time to build a more useful home for your customer data, with the ability to automatically detect and classify PII. Once you've connected your data to your new CDP, it will automatically assess the level of risk associated with each data point by matching it against common PII field classifications.
Don't agree that customer credit card numbers are a red-level risk classification, for example? No problem, simply change the level of security required for that property by choosing a new option from the drop-down menu.
While it’s important to verbally reinforce your company's privacy policy, implementing privacy controls that ensure that teams have no option but to follow the rules is a much faster route to peace of mind.
Make the privacy controls panel within your CDP one of your first stops. There you should be able to set rules to automatically block restricted personal data from being collected, and start proactively enforcing your privacy policies in the process.
Next, head to your CDP's open source consent manager to configure your compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
With automated data subject rights management, this process is massively accelerated, giving your engineers (and legal team) more time to focus on the tasks that matter. Whether your customers want you to delete and modify their data, or even stop collecting it entirely, you'll be able to make those changes within seconds.
To make it simple for you, Twilio Segment can deliver all of the above – and more. With a huge integration catalogue and plenty of no-code features, Segment provides easy-to-maintain capability to your teams with minimal engineering effort.
You'll gain real-time visibility into the personal information you're collecting, giving you the power of full control over the information you choose to keep or discard. Teams can then collaborate, analyse data, and create targeted audiences without exposing sensitive information, ensuring compliance with stringent data protection regulations and unlocking powerful advertising and analytics capabilities.
Keeping data secure as technology evolves doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming. It’s simply a matter of having the right tools.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.