In fact, things have been pretty business as usual. The vast majority of consumers have consented to publishers using their data, and brand and third-party data brokers are still collecting, crunching and monetizing a sizable amount of internet user data.
The real question is how marketers and technology companies will respond to the challenges that lie in the not-so-distant future. Based on data from Forrester (paywall), countries across the globe are expected to enact even stricter data collection regulations in the coming years, and it’s going to be a rough transition for brands and technology companies alike. That will be the true test of how companies react to more privacy-sensitive data policies.
The European Union passed the GDPR in 2016 to give European consumers greater control of their personal data, requiring marketers and publishers to get explicit consent before collecting user data.
The law didn’t go into effect until 2018, however, and there was an endless amount of hand-wringing over those two years as to how the statute would be applied. And once it was, it seemed as though consumers were ready to have more regulations put in place to protect their data privacy.
Turns out consumers are more concerned about privacy in theory than they are in practice. GDPR’s effect on online data collection has been minimal. Consumers have opted into online data collection agreements more than 90% of the time since the law went into effect. Research continues to show that the vast majority of consumers are comfortable exchanging personal data for increased usability or free access to a service, just as long as the agreement is clearly communicated.
As such, GDPR has also had almost no effect on the insights companies can glean from consumer data. Data companies are still able to advise their clients on consumer behavior and how to change their business practices to best suit their customers.
I believe the future of digital privacy law is likely to focus on collecting data at the individual level, however, and that’s where things get tricky.
One of the biggest misperceptions about consumer data is companies want to know about John Doe, the individual consumer, and all of his particular consumption habits. The truth is, individual data isn’t very helpful to marketers. Data is most valuable in aggregate because it allows brands to identify large groups of consumers and analyze consumer behavior at scale.
But brands have grown accustomed to tracking an individual's path to purchase. It doesn’t matter that this information isn’t very informative or useful -- marketers like knowing they can explore data with this level granularity. It’s reassuring. And marketers are likely to be rattled if individual, non-anonymized data collection is ever regulated
Placing limits on individual data collection would force companies to stop analyzing individual data points when conducting market research. Instead, companies would have to focus on entire groups of consumers, using aggregated and anonymized data.
This is why I’m in favor of reasonable data privacy legislation. If drafted correctly, it could be an enormous benefit to the data and marketing industries. It would encourage data companies to conduct data collection in a manner that is both valuable to marketers and respectful of consumers’ privacy. And it would provide more substantive, actionable insights for marketers.
If GDPR has proven anything, it’s that respecting consumer privacy doesn’t have to come at the expense of growth. The digital media industry appears to still be thriving despite the supposedly stringent law.
Indeed, respecting privacy, and promoting reasonable legislation, might be the very key to success.
