To digital marketers, a consumer’s real identity is like gold.
That’s because a real identity is definitive, can be used to tell if someone pays bills on time and can be linked across many data layers that define what kind of customer a person is and what interests him/her.
But digital identities are not held in some virtual Fort Knox, and they are more vulnerable these days than ever. In fact, digital identity is facing a variety of crises — as well as testing out potential fixes.
One encroaching crisis goes by the initials GDPR.
It stands for General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union’s new standards for consumers’ rights over their personal data, and it will go into effect next year. It sets up a variety of ways in which customers must grant permission for brands to use their data, and how brands must manage it.
The regulation pertains to customers from EU countries when they are in those countries — and when they are in non-EU countries. This means that major brands — and many smaller ones — will technically have at least part of their marketing data and management under GDPR guidelines.
If the enforcement is more than token, Forrester analyst Joe Stanhope thinks that management of digital identities “might bifurcate” into those that adhere to GDPR and those that do not.
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