Abracadabra, Alakazam – the time for data pseudonymization is now at hand
Published: January 18th, 2022
Personal data pseudonymization, data privacy rights, or the right to be forgotten: no matter what you call it, individuals should control their digital footprint.
Data regulations that give people the right to ask organizations to delete their personal data are known by many names: the right to be forgotten, right to erasure, de-identification, data anonymization*, or, as Facebook (sorry Meta, we’re still getting used to that name) calls it, data deletion request. But no matter what you call it or whether it’s Google, Facebook, or Apple, the underlying idea is the same — the digital world is quickly moving toward individuals having more and more control over their personal data.
A case in point is iOs 14, which, as we all know, has already changed how third-party data is used. Further, the general public is certainly becoming increasingly aware of their own data rights and are increasingly pushing for those rights to be honored. The coming third-party cookie-pocalypse can no longer be ignored.
This is a critical development for marketing teams in organizations, not only because of what’s happening now with data anonymization but also what the future will look like with these current trends. Essentially there are three questions organizations should ask themselves:
- Are you able to truly handle deletion requests right now that meet GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, and other data regulation laws that are relevant to you?
- Are you well set up to easily adapt to the future of personal data that increasingly looks to be moving toward an individual having true control over their data?
- Are you still able to obtain the customer information you need to deliver great customer experiences as access to third-party data disappears?
If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to all of these, you need to ask yourself what you can do to make sure you’re ready for today and the future. At Bread & Butter, we’ve always believed that customers should have the right to control their data and we built our platform with that principle in mind. Our data support GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA standards, is easy for your organization to honor customer requests to be forgotten, and gives you meaningful (actually, more meaningful) data so you can deliver great customer journeys and experiences.
How does Bread & Butter IO do it? Well, it starts with our one-click conversion. We allow your organization to support popular, trusted login options like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple, and enterprise identity providers like Microsoft, Okta, and OneLogin — and we do the complex part of the SAML, OAuth and ODIC, so you don’t have to.
Removing friction from your sign-in/sign-up process has been shown to increase the likelihood of converting a visitor to a customer by 80%. It’s a true win-win: ease of use for your customers, and meaningful first-party data for your business.
Bread & Butter IO makes it easy to gather first-party data and gives your organization the ability to handle the request to be forgotten, all with one simple implementation (even no-code in some cases). You can choose to have a widget on your site that gives people the ability to initiate their right to be forgotten, or your organization can act on incoming email requests. Either way, once the individual starts their de-identification, they must securely re-identify themselves to ensure they are the correct individual. After identification (authorization), your Bread & Butter IO dashboard will notify you of the request. There is a grace period for review (your organization sets the grace period to match your needs) before the data is pseudonymized to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA standards.
Analytics, tracking, and the way organizations interact with data are changing. More jurisdictions are adopting data privacy laws and rights, and the days of creepily tracking interactions and traffic as a listening party are over. Instead, if your brand wants to future-proof its digital footprint and build trust with its customers, it must pivot to ethically-sourced first-party data. Bread & Butter IO is a solution that lets you answer ‘yes’ to all the questions we posed earlier in this article.
Visit breadbutter.io to learn more about how Bread & Butter IO gathers ethically-sourced first-party data and how utterly simple it is to implement on your organization’s site.
*Data anonymization, to be clear, is not identical to data pseudonymization. The former indicates a complete erasure of data so that there is no possible way to reconstruct the identity of the individual while the latter indicates removing personal data such that it can no longer be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information. GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA current standards call for data pseudonymization. We include the term data anonymization here for the reader’s benefit, as there is an understandable confusion for those not intimately aware of the regulations.
