Evidon Builds GDPR-Universal Consent Integration with Launch by Adobe

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If you’re like most, you’re still trying to understand exactly what the EU’s upcoming Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) means for your business. While legal teams work overtime to ensure compliance obligations are met, and engineering teams expand to build out mechanisms for data stream visibility, many are still strategizing for how to best manage against the potential for regulatory risks, while also leveraging the opportunity to embrace consent management as a means to measure brand loyalty and trust.

With the GDPR, the vulnerabilities of the online ecosystem are exposed more than ever. The industry’s historical reliance on an unreasonable level of opacity, and often unquantifiable risk/return, has made managing consent and data protection obligations tricky, at best. This is where Evidon’s Digital Governance platform excels. By offering enterprises visibility into their entire marketing technology stack, organizations can mitigate against the challenges associated with the use of digital vendors, as well as offer their users the ability to withdraw or provide consent for the collection and use of their data.

While Evidon’s consent offering is only one piece to the “GDPR puzzle,” it’s importance cannot be challenged. It’s your business’s best opportunity to introduce data collection, transparency, and control to your customers.

GDPR highlights.

The key elements to the consent portion of GDPR are the ability to: 1. Communicate data practices to users, and 2. Offer users an easy way for an individual to provide or withdraw consent. For consent to be valid under the GDPR, it must be specific, affirmative, and unambiguous.

There’s no question of the value of data collection, both for businesses and for consumers. In fact, while countless industry reports tell us that users don’t believe their online privacy is respected enough by businesses, there is much research to the contrary. In this 2016 Adlucent study, it’s noted that “71 percent of respondents prefer ads tailored to interests and shopping habits,” and “44 percent were willing to give up information including name, address, or email address in order to get more personalized advertising.”

So how can businesses continue to benefit from data collection, while realizing informed user consent? By illustrating to customers why data collection is valuable, and offering a means for control over what and how this data is collected. Both can be accomplished through one easy to understand privacy platform.

The GDPR requires persistent control and accessibility to privacy preferences, which Evidon helps to facilitate in two ways:

  1. Communicate data practices to users.
    • Required persistent consent banner until consent is given.
    • Users can still access site when consent is not provided.
    • Only essential or functional technologies can activate before an individual consents.
  2. Offer users ability to provide and withdraw individual consent.
    • Direct user access to, and control of, third party digital data collection.
    • Direct user access to, and control of, first party digital data collection via in-house and partnership integrations.

At its core, Evidon offers consumers easy access to their digital privacy preferences. This means the option to exercise personal data rights, visibility into and control over personal data collection, as well as the right to access and object to profiling, or online tracking. As a result, not only can enterprises adhere to the GDPR with Evidon’s consent platform, they can also comply with other privacy legislations, such as Canada’s PIPEDA law and the upcoming revisions to the EU’s ePrivacy Directive.

Through the Evidon and Launch by Adobe integration, known as an Extension, we’ve enabled our customers to leverage two of their most trusted partners through one interface. While it’s no secret that offering users control over their data is crucial to a business’s success in a privacy-centric world, so to is a business’s ability to have control over the technologies leveraged to collect that data, which is where Launch excels.

With Evidon’s Consent Platform Extension in Launch, Evidon has maintained both creative and developmental ownership over our Consent Platform integration, including the ability to build and regularly update features requested by our wealth of clients, without the checks and balances-based delays inherent in traditional technology integrations.

The GDPR is a great starting point for businesses to enhance their digital governance strategy, and to advocate for greater discipline with regard to internal data management. Ultimately, it’s technologies like Launch by Adobe that will assist businesses in managing the user data third party technologies have access to.

Mollie Panzner is the Senior Director of Product Strategy at Evidon, and a subject matter expert on digital governance and vendor analysis.

Evidon is a transparency company that helps organizations to educate consumers on how and why data is collected, as well as provide consumers with the ability to give and withdraw consent to their data being used. Evidon’s technology comprises monitoring tools for businesses to better understand the impacts that their data collection might have on users, and a universal consent platform to ensure those users have access to, and control over, their data at any point in time — on websites and in mobile apps. If you’d like to better understand your own site’s implementations, you can visit us at Evidon.com, or follow us on Twitter at @Evidon.