Conditional action for consent check aka action consent aware

[#1]

With GDPR coming, the need for consent awareness of rules and actions is becoming more stringent.

We have quite a lot of rules which stack up depending on a consent level of the user (e.g.):

- strict -> only complete anonymous tracking allowed (eg. analytics beacon)

- mid -> some user identification allowed (hashed)

- low -> 3rd party pixels allowed

Currently we have to make for each of these levels a rule, take e.g. a simple page view:

- level at least strict -> send out the analytics beacon

- level at least mid -> send data to DMP

- level at least low -> set a DoubleClick display Pixel

Which ends up for quite a lot of our rules, we have to double or triple them...

Some idea could be to have e.g. a consent check action in the action chain. If the check fails, the rest of the action chain is not executed anymore. This could combine the 3 rules above into 1 page view rule with this action chain:

Actions: set AA vars -> send AA beacon -> clear AA vars -> check consent mid -> send data to DMP -> consent check low -> send 3rd party pixels

Another idea could be to have an action being consent aware itself, so the action is only executed if a global consent level (e.g. set in a cookie) is met. The "old" sat_track option is to black/white and does block everything or nothing...

Any thoughts on this?

Stefan

[#2]

Hi Stefan,

That's definitely a great application for rule conditions/exceptions in Launch.

It looks like there are currently three extensions in the launch catalog offering to help manage user consent. One by Evidon, one by One Trust and one by TrustArc.

I'd be curious to hear if one of those meets your needs or not.

[#3]

If the consent banner is loaded through tag management systems, you might face race conditions.

1) Try placing the consent banner onto the page directly as high as possible.

2) As soon as the banner gets rendered, ingest an event to indicate consent banner is loaded

3) Similarly if the default opt-in/opt-out - you need additional configuration that checks the consent choices.

4) Test whether consent preferences are coming as early as possible If not you might have to wait for consent preferences to load and then trigger the rules (Analytics, Personalization, Marketing Etc..

In our case we created different data elements for different consent groups and further added these to respective rules as a condition to check if the consent is given - if yes, then to run action part which triggers actual beacon.