Marketers Must Be Privacy-Conscious as Enforcement Gears Up, Says Consultant
Marketers mustn’t take a reactive attitude to privacy compliance with enforcement heating up, said Lucas Long, InfoTrust head of global privacy, on a Thursday webinar hosted by the vendor Osano.
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“Enforcement is heating up quite a bit,” said the consultant, citing last week’s announcement by California, Colorado and Connecticut privacy regulators about an investigative sweep into whether companies are honoring universal opt-out requests transmitted by the Global Privacy Control (see 2509090045). And in Europe, “at least a handful of DPAs” have it on their 3-5 year enforcement priority lists that they will do “more automated technical enforcement” related to consent, notice and disclosure.
Keep in mind that "enforcement agencies are funded based upon the settlements that they are able to get, so there's ... built-in incentive for [them to take] additional enforcement action[s].”
Privacy compliance has become a key component of marketers’ role since they're "dealing with the most consumer data,” the consultant noted. “The baseline requirement” for marketers “is to be compliance conscious … Be conscious of what you need to be doing to respect the rights of users."
For instance, marketers should embed privacy in ad design and strategy, Long said. That means providing “effective notice,” which “requires an understanding of what data is being collected” and how it’s being used downstream, said the consultant: It also means providing user choice and addressing data access, deletion and correction.
Privacy isn’t a one-and-done task for marketers, said Long. “Just think about how frequently you're adding additional tags to your website in order to track campaigns. And each time that happens, that is a potential risk factor if a consent condition isn't properly added to that tag, or you're not … properly updating cookies and notice for users.”