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What this means in a practical sense is that if you’re wishing to use behavioral data
from your prospective customer to re-market to them in the future, you need to
request explicit permission to do so. You can’t start using behavioral data on your
website to engage with them elsewhere without them actively allowing you to do
so. To gain access to the data, the consent needs to be active (instead of passive)
representing a conscious choice to give you the data. This is why many websites
now explicitly require you to click a button to allow the use of cookies on their sites.

Included in GDPR is also a requirement around data portability. What this means
is that a customer has the right to access, modify, erase, or move the data that you
have on them. This rule, while specific to the European Union, has significant
ramifications for how much businesses value the collection and usage of data.
Whereas data used to be uniquely valuable to a company, now that it can be moved
by the individual to a new service, its longer-term value is less.

For more information on the GDPR, see https://gdpr-info.eu.

California Consumer Privacy Act

In a similar fashion to GDPR, the state of California passed new data privacy laws
that took effect in January 2020. This law stipulates that consumers have the right
to be informed about what kinds of personal data companies have collected and
why it was collected. The law also stipulates that consumers have the right to
request the deletion of personal information, opt out of the sale of personal infor-
mation, and access the personal information in a “readily useable format” that
allows them to move the data elsewhere. In many ways as you can see, the law is
similar to GDPR and it’s probably only a matter of time before other states or the
U.S. government enacts a similar law.

With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), personal information may
include geolocation, biometric data, Internet browsing history, psychometric
data, and the like. This is all data that companies use to market to consumers in a
more targeted fashion today. So what does this mean for you in a practical sense?

The most direct impact of CCPA is on the social media platforms that need to be
more stringent in how they collect, use, and allow third parties (which includes
advertisers like you) to leverage all the data. For example, if customers start to
lose interest in a platform like Twitter or Facebook, they can ask those platforms
to delete all their user data. This will hinder your ability to market on those plat-
forms whether it’s to those customers itself or to other customers who are just
like them. Another influence of these changing laws are the limits placed by the
social media platforms. This will affect how much their algorithms can combine
data from millions of users to present content and advertising to end users.

For more information on the CCPA, see https://www.caprivacy.org.
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