Our Stance on Data Privacy
Personalizing a customer's experience requires knowing the customers and keeping their interests front and center. Depending on the level of personalization and the desired results, it may require anonymously creating either persona or customer segments, actually identifying customers or recognizing customers, following their online activity and behavior, knowing their likes and dislikes, collecting their data, analyzing their data, storing their data, anticipating changes in their preferences and then continually repeating that process.
Because of heightened public concerns about data loss and identity theft, the once abundant pool of consumer data is drying up for marketers. Access to data is being impeded as:
- Privacy regulations let consumers control how data is used
Regulators have repeatedly raised red flags regarding the lack of transparency in online programmatic advertising and how the ecosystem has severely lagged in adoption of modern privacy laws, resulting in laws that grant consumers the right to request how companies use their data. - Browsers block third-party cookies in the name of user privacy
Major browsers have taken consumer privacy into their own hands, with many blocking third-party cookies used to collect and track data by default, and some announcing plans to phase them out entirely.
Misuse of data can make customers feel that their privacy has been violated, leading to alienation from your business. In this context of a privacy-driven world, personalization may seem like a huge task. However, while consumers want greater transparency in how their data is used, they also expect personalized experiences to enhance their experience with your brand.
Monetate believes personalization and privacy are not diametrically opposed. Given that we are not an advertising firm, we have no intention of tracking end users across sites, and we focus on personalization for users within your brand experience. As many of these industry changes are crafted with the goal of tightening privacy standards for the advertising industry, many of these regulations and browser updates impact us almost by accident.
In this context, managing personalization with privacy is all about using your customers' data respectably and maintaining transparency in your use of data for personalization. We are committed to working with our clients as partners in personalization in a privacy-driven world. To that end, we are actively working on changes to comply with tighter security standards.