This post is part of G2's 2021 digital trends series. Read more about G2’s perspective on digital transformation trends in an introduction from Michael Fauscette, G2's chief research officer and Tom Pringle, VP, market research, and additional coverage on trends identified by G2’s analysts.

The evolution toward people-centric data privacy technology

Broadly speaking, the purpose of privacy legislation is to honor specific individual’s choices regarding their data and its privacy. Data privacy is different from data security. Privacy is not about protecting sensitive data generically, it’s about protecting how specific people’s data will be used. Data privacy is concerned with honoring a specific person’s choices, adhering to their consents about tracking, selling, or sharing their data, satisfying requests for amendments to the data about them, and fulfilling requests for data access, porting, or deletion.

People-centric privacy technology solutions

For businesses to best comply with privacy regulations that focus on individual people and their choices, the privacy technology tools businesses use need to be people centric. 

Current data privacy companies that offer people-centric views of data, data mapping, and automated data discovery, as opposed to manual data discovery, will be better positioned to offer people-centric technology solutions moving forward. This is opposed to manual solutions that often offer workflows to have employees sift through siloed databases to find buckets of personally identifiable data and hope that the individual’s target data resides there. It’s a process akin to trying to find a needle (an individual’s data) in a haystack (a random bucket of personally identifiable data). 

A focus on customer experience

It’s not enough for privacy technology solutions to offer people-centric views of the data they have on an individual; the next generation of privacy tools is about offering a complete people-centric experience to individuals, as well. Gone are the days where legalese, lengthy conditions, and other opaque data selling or sharing rules are laid out to baffled end users. 

Consumers want control over the data they share with companies. They want consent preferences and data subject requests in understandable, ease-to-access, and self-help formats. This is why data privacy solutions will need to focus on good consumer and end-user design moving forward to remain competitive. 

The rise of the "privacy center"

Some companies are already starting to focus on the end users with the launch of privacy centers:

• Salesforce launched two products in October 2020: Security Center and Privacy Center. 

The Privacy Center product assists Salesforce customers with data retention, data subjects rights, and offers privacy-related analytics tools. It is a lightweight solution at the moment as it is the first iteration of the product, but Salesforce has plans to add more granular functionality enhancements in future updates.

• SkyPoint Cloud launched their Privacy Center product in September 2020. 

The product offers tools for managing privacy policies, obtaining consent from consumers, and managing data subject requests, all via a consumer-facing site that funnels into their platform—the customer 360 profile. 

What is interesting about SkyPoint Cloud is their technical origins in customer data platforms (tools used to consolidate and integrate customer data in one database). These tools are typically used by marketers and are now being used to manage privacy consents, as well. The combination of marketing and privacy tools makes sense, especially in situations where a common use case of using consumer data is for consented advertising purposes.

Consent is gaining traction

Interest in consent management is rising. On G2, a steady growth in traffic to our Consent Management Platform (CMP) software category has been seen, with the category surpassing other popular categories such as Data Privacy Management software and Identity Verification software.

I anticipate the interest in the Consent Management Platform category growing with the Belgian Data Protection Authority’s recent decision in October 2020 that deemed the advertising industry’s Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe’s commonly used Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF)—which is a method to gather internet user’s consent to be targeted with behavioral advertisements—as failing to meet GDPR standards. 

How software providers can stay competitive

Moving forward, I anticipate the most competitive data privacy software providers to focus on people-centric views and people-centric experiences, in particular dynamic consents.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and am not offering legal advice. If you have legal questions, consult a licensed attorney.

Edited by Sinchana Mistry