Segment Launches Privacy Portal to Help Businesses Proactively Manage and Protect Their Customers’ Privacy

 Segment, the customer data infrastructure company, have today announced the launch of the Segment Privacy Portal, a new set of features that help businesses put their customers through proactive privacy management.  They said it would be available to all of their customers immmediately.  The announcement was made at Synapse, the company’s annual user conference.

With the Privacy Portal, businesses can have more control and visibility of the first-party customer data they are collecting. This allows them to more easily meet compliance requirements for regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA, enforce data policies and protect their customers’ privacy.

Data Privacy: A Global Priority

By 2020, 50% of the world’s population will be covered by a privacy regulation like the GDPR. Today’s consumers are more aware of how businesses are using their personal data than ever before, demanding the highest standards of privacy from every organization with which they interact. At the same time, consumers also expect brands to deliver consistent, relevant and personalized experiences across all touchpoints.

To meet these competing demands, businesses have to know and trust that their first-party customer data has been fully vetted in line with company policies, consumer preferences, and regulations like the GDPR and CCPA.  Historically, companies managed this by manually compiling an inventory of all the customer data housed within their organization – a time and resource-intensive process with limited value, since records fall out of date the second a new data point is collected.

Visibility, Control, and Automation

They said that their Privacy Portal can make proactive privacy management faster, easier and more effective, creating a real-time data inventory that automatically detects customer data and allows companies to classify it in line with their relevant internal policies.

With all first-party customer data flowing through the Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI), businesses gain the visibility and controls they need to control how data is collected, managed and used within the organization. They can also set rules governing the data points they want to automatically restrict, or prevent from being collected in the first place. Whenever a restricted data point is detected, the Privacy Portal immediately alerts the business and blocks it from passing through.

For example, a company might use the Portal to automatically classify its data into three categories: standard (green), private (yellow) and restricted (red). With these parameters set, they will automatically map out where data is being passed, sort the data by chosen categories and assigned rules, and enforce policies automatically. This way restricted data does not pass to a destination.

Setting the Standard for Privacy-First Data

The Privacy Portal brings three new functionalities to the company’s Customer Data Infrastructure, setting the standard for customer data that businesses and consumers can trust:

• Gain confidence with visibility into your customer data. The Privacy Portal saves businesses the months needed to manually create a data inventory by providing a real-time overview of what customer data is being gathered, where, and how it is being used and stored. It also automatically detects personally identifiable information and allows businesses to set restrictions on how it is being used and shared. As the number of customer channels proliferates, it is only with full visibility that businesses can have confidence in their data.

• Manage risk exposure and streamline compliance. Their customers can set rules to automatically block, hash or selectively route data, to manage their risk exposure and ensure data collection complies with all company privacy policies and requirements.
• Make privacy management more efficient. The Privacy Portal continuously monitors customer data collection in real time, automatically sending alerts whenever restricted data points are collected. It also reduces the time and resources needed to manage data privacy, so companies can focus their efforts on creating better products and customer experiences.

These new functionalities add to existing end-user privacy tools that simplify GDPR and other regulatory compliance for Segment customers through streamlined management of user suppression and deletion requests.

“The privacy-personalization paradox is a false dichotomy,” said Segment’s CEO and co-founder, Peter Reinhardt. “Privacy is not a zero-sum game, traded off against growth or the quality of the customer experiences. With the Privacy Portal, companies have the tools they need to respect privacy and mitigate risk, without sacrificing the customer-first experiences that continue to drive their business forward.”

“Segment’s Privacy Portal gives us the confidence to align our event data streams with our company’s data privacy and governance standards,” said Rudy Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at Trustpilot, the leading customer review platform. “With real-time visibility across our event streams, we are able to proactively respect our customers’ privacy.”

“With data increasingly core to business success, managing data privacy risk has become central to realizing its rewards,” said Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum. “Products like the Segment Privacy Portal are valuable because they help companies prepare for the increasing number of laws guaranteeing privacy rights to consumers.”