Organizations now have a legal responsibility to protect their consumers’ personal information and practice safe data management in light of the proliferation of data privacy laws worldwide, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), and others.
According to UNCTAD, 71% of countries globally had enacted data privacy laws as of 2022, making consent management a top concern for companies.
Consent management across all customer-facing channels is crucial now more than ever as states and countries globally introduce new data privacy standards almost daily. Customers want to feel safe and confident that you consider their preferences when using their personal information.
The GDPR and CCPA have some of the most stringent regulations on consumer consent. For instance, GDPR requires organizations to obtain customer consent before selling personal data. Similarly, the CCPA obligates organizations to give consumers a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” opt-out button to allow them to veto the selling of their data.
To gain further insight into consent management CMP support, here’s an in-depth look at consent management, consent management platforms, CMP requirements, and CMP terms and conditions.
What Is Consent Management?
Consent management is the process of providing site users with the option to only give personal data they are comfortable sharing. Organizations, apps, and websites must actively request, collect, and manage user consent to comply with most privacy regulations.
In recent years, user consent management has become increasingly crucial for websites and apps that collect personal data using tracking technologies such as cookies.
Effective consent management processes should keep tabs on consent collection, relieving you of the burden of ensuring compliance with privacy laws. It should also streamline how you collect consumers’ consent, use their data rightfully, and ensure you do everything under applicable data privacy regulations.
What Is a Consent Management Platform?
A consent management platform (CMP) ensures your business, website, or app complies with privacy regulations. By automating your consent management process using a CMP, you can more easily maintain compliance and create a great customer experience.
To achieve this goal, a CMP will seek consent from users before collecting personal information. The CMP consent should also allow customers to learn more about the data you collect and how you use it. CMP tools also store consent information securely and process users’ data requests to change their consent preferences.
The data collected from users has several potential applications, including developing targeted marketing and advertising programs. Since it is becoming increasingly clear that the world is moving towards increased consumer privacy, considering the number of new privacy laws currently springing up worldwide, practically all businesses will require robust and dedicated CMPs.
How Consent Works with a CMP
A CMP will show users’ cookie banners and request consent to collect and use their data. The CMP tracker will then wait for consent before starting its monitoring. Users can accept or decline all cookies or consent to specific categories. If the user has disabled cookies or hasn’t given permission, you should not use their data.
The CMP prevents scripts from executing and gathering sensitive information until users give their go-ahead. If the subject consents, the platform then records and stores the users’ approval on a database to prove compliance.
Who Requires CMP?
You need CMP support if your businesses process personal data when sending newsletters, conduct user behavior analysis, tailor content to users, or engage in behavioral advertising and remarketing.
Cookie usage on your website is also an integral aspect of data processing. If your website keeps track of cookies and uses them, you will also require CMP consent to comply with the most recent privacy laws.
Why You Need CMP Consent Support
Avoid Financial Penalties
Consent management regulations carry significant penalties for violations. Between 2020 and 2021, 6 of the 14 highest GDPR fines all had their roots in unlawful consent collection.
According to the GDPR, the European Union’s Data Protection Authorities can impose fines of up to €20 million (about $24.1 million) or 4% of a company’s annual global revenue, whichever is greater.
On the other hand, companies in breach of the CCPA face fines of $2,500 per violation or $7,500 per deliberate violation if they do not rectify the situation within 30 days of getting notified of the infraction.
Always Stay in Compliance
With the ever-evolving nature of data privacy regulations, your company’s practices must always remain completely compliant. Your CMP consent support will collect all the new laws and best practices in the industry and update the software regularly to ensure you’re always compliant and that the data is readily available for compliance audits.
Build Trust with Your Customers
Most data privacy laws do not touch on trust. However, businesses in today’s privacy-conscious society should respect customers’ right to personal data security and confidentiality by giving them full access and a say in the decisions made concerning their data.
If a business breaches the consent management regulations, it will need to work to regain the trust of its customers. You can earn consumers’ trust by being transparent about the data collection process and its purposes.
Centralized Consent Data
Most organizations’ customer data exists in silos or separate databases, and users may have various identities throughout the company’s systems, processes, and settings.
CMP consent helps organizations centralize their customer data so that all relevant parties can easily access it. Consolidating the consent data into a single platform will improve your business’s compliance and productivity.
CMP Requirements
Most CMP tools will perform what you need them to, but there are some key CMP requirements you should look out for to ensure a perfect fit:
Collection of CMP Consent
All privacy laws generally agree CMP consent should be free, precise, informed, and explicit. As a result, the data subject needs to know who the controller is, the type of data collected and processed, the purpose and reasons for collecting, and processing conditions.
A platform for notification and automated consent collection simplifies this requirement, especially as organizations add new features to their apps and websites to enable consent capture.
Record of User Consent
You should always keep records of the consent you have collected from users just in case data protection authorities want proof that you obtained consent in accordance with the law. A CMP facilitates the centralization of user consent data to show compliance with privacy requirements.
The stored data is crucial proof of compliance under regulations like the GDPR and CCPA. Here are some of the information you should keep on record:
Who gave consent
When the user provided the consent
What the user consented to
Propagation Management
Organizations are increasingly collecting and managing personal information, such as location data and IP addresses. Most businesses usually share this data with various advertising and marketing networks to deliver enhanced services.
The CMP should make it easier to notify users, acquire consent, and share that consent to permitted third-party solutions to achieve business goals.
Auto-Blocking Third-Party Cookies
Until a user gives their permission, it is not acceptable to use third-party cookies, even though they are essential for analytics and advertising platforms. A CMP should prevent access to cookies from third parties unless the user takes action in the cookie banner.
Offer an Option for Changes
Data subjects have the right to access their personal information in a structured, generally used, and machine-readable format upon request, as required by most privacy regulations. A CMP should make it easy for users to access the consent pop-up, so they can change their consent preferences for various purposes and perform other user rights whenever they see fit.
Customizable Cookie Consent Banner
Although many privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA specify what constitutes valid consent, they do not provide guidelines on the format of the cookie consent banner. That said, the cookie banner on your website should be highly customizable to fit in with the rest of the site’s aesthetic and messaging.
Separate Business and CMP Terms and Conditions
Your CMP must treat the request for consent as a distinct and separate process from the business terms to comply with regulations. It is also vital to keep CMP terms and conditions, consent forms, and requests separate and to avoid legal and technical jargon. You should always provide easy-to-understand Consent information before recording any data.
The IAB Transparency and Consent Framework
One of the first global standards for consent transfer is the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework. AdTech companies look to the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework as a standard for collecting and exchanging user consent data.
It controls how organizations can share data across the advertising supply chain and standardizes consent collection for data processing. However, the framework does not offer precise guidelines for responding to requests from data subjects or recording their consent.
Since ConsentID will soon be the only method for managing personalized advertising, a CMP consent should comply with the IAB standard.
CMP Consent with Adzapier
When it comes to data privacy laws, consent is one of the fundamental requirements. Manually complying with this regulation is time-consuming, expensive, and even risky. But only if you’re not using Adzapier’s CMP consent support.
Thanks to our platform’s built-in compliance features, your business will always be in line with the ever-changing data privacy regulations. Adzapier’s Consent Management Platform offers a cutting-edge solution to help companies to comply with GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and other privacy regulations.
The flexible configuration options in this user-friendly CMP make it possible to tailor it to your organization’s specific consent management needs.
Moreover, the platform can enhance your customers’ experiences and boost your business’ productivity by adopting industry best practices. The CMP can improve your company’s wide-ranging consent data collection and processing through automation.