Customer Data and Privacy Innovation Trends
An update and a new Venn from the Customer Data Alliance conference
Last week, I had the pleasure of addressing a community assembled by a new organization called the Customer Data Alliance (CDA), the brainchild of Chris Adelman in concert with strategic partners at Emory University and the Customer Data Platform Institute.
The theme of this conference was Is Consent Dead? Customer Data Privacy and Consent in the Age of AI. That’s a mouthful, and a lot of hot topics all at once! You might guess that I contributed the consent elements here, and you’d be right.
The general field of martech (marketing technology) is not one of my areas of expertise, but I have a keen interest in how it operates and its impact on identity, security, and privacy aims. Having worked on customer IAM (CIAM) efforts for many years, broached the deadness of consent at EIC last year, and seen ever more eye-popping research coming out of Internet Safety Labs, I’ve waded into at least the shallow end of the pool of customer data platforms (CDPs), identity resolution, and data brokers.
I owe thanks to Lee Hammond, a marketing guru who was innovating social sign-in and fan profile techniques at Universal Music Group for acts such as Lady Gaga way back when. He was a research source for me at Forrester on these innovations, and more recently he was kind enough to share perspectives and resources as I did new research for this event.
Although I’ve visited with the cybersecurity and identity community in Atlanta multiple times now, this was my first exposure to its marketing, data, and privacy cohorts. The Atlanta tech community continues to impress and inspire! It was an honor to represent the identity perspective, alongside domain experts like Jennifer Carson of Kyndryl, John Brigagliano of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP, Blake Brannon of OneTrust, and Jodi Daniels of Red Clover Advisors.
My opening keynote focused squarely on the aliveness/deadness of consent — decorated with “consent cats” (as seen above), inspired by Schrödinger and his thought experiment.
Here was my attempt at a new Venn diagram describing the commonalities among these worlds.
The audience seemed to resonate with these definitional points:
Regarding “little data” vs. “big data”, one way to illustrate the difference is that a CIAM profile probably has no more than 20 attributes while a data broker probably has 2000 attributes on offer.
Regarding “direct” vs. “indirect,” identity centers on unique authentication, while the game in adtech and martech is first and foremost heuristic association, which can be performed without the individual’s involvement (as you might have noticed…).
I’d love to hear what you think of this Venn.
I found it gratifyingly easy to make common cause with others at the event, including shared passions around privacy. One of the topics I touched on was recent consent innovations, and ways to combine them to solve the conundrums of missing or defective consent. When it came to panel time, the audience showed repeated interest in several of these innovations, primarily the concepts of right-to-use licensing and Consent Receipts.
In what may portend further support for such innovations, a fantastic new conversation has been brewing in the identity community recently about using the Shared Signals Framework for consent events, potentially along with Consent Receipts. I’m pleased to be helping it along and connecting some of the key parties.
A lot of the material I shared in Atlanta was based on my Consent Is Dead paper published in December. In it, I mooted this and other personal data innovation scenarios. If you’re curious to learn more about these scenarios and technologies, the paper is a quick download away! It can also help you assess your organization’s appetite for exploring them. I hope you’ll check it out.
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Cool to see SSF being leveraged for "consent events" I can see how consent might run into less friction when following the same path as threat intelligence, making it transparent to the end user. I maintain that consent is NOT dead. It's alive...if you want it to be.