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How do CDPs secure customer data?

Last updated: August 18, 2023

Our phones are listening to us. Our targeted ads can read our minds. In my case, my TikTok algorithm took 8 hours to realize that I’d moved cross-country and swapped my Chicago-related content with #losangeles and #california posts.  

If you grew up alongside the Internet, you’ve probably encountered a situation like this and laughed it off. But jokes aside, consumers are becoming more selective over who gets access to their personal information: 93 percent of Americans say it’s important to be able to control who has access to their data. 

In response to those concerns, state, national and international governments have passed regulations requiring companies to disclose how, why and when they use customer data.  

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The fines for falling short are considerable: Violators of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, which applies to EU citizens around the world, may be fined up to €20 million, or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year. New amendments to the Federal Trade Commission’s Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act also impose stiffer penalties for privacy violations — and hold companies responsible for protecting personally identifiable information from accidental disclosure.  

The costs go beyond the financial, though: Companies from Facebook and Wells Fargo to Yahoo and Microsoft have all faced legal action and reputational harm for misusing or exposing their users’ personal information.  

But you already know that you need to keep your customers’ data safe (we hope). For many organizations, the challenge isn’t a lack of desire, but a lack of resources. Companies struggle to manage the sheer volume of customer data coming in through their CRM, DMP, email platform, marketing automation platform, subscription management software, demo request forms, etc. With customer data coming from so many different sources, it’s easy to lose track of which users opted out of specific permissions.   

In this case, it’s an innocent mistake. But if your customer information is exposed in a breach, or customers learn that their data is being stored and used against their wishes, it’s a costly one.  

What if you could manage all of your customer data, regardless of the input source, from one database?  

That’s where customer data platforms come in handy. CDPs collect disparate customer data and unify it in one central place. This gives you a single view of each customer, making it easier to track individual permissions and consent across your whole company. So when someone asks to be deleted from your database, you can fulfill their request in just a few clicks.  

Learn how to navigate privacy concerns with a CDP next:  

How can I navigate privacy concerns with a CDP?  

1. Provide more accurate, complete customer records upon request 

Under the GDPR and other American data privacy regulations, companies are required to provide users with a complete and accurate customer profile upon request. If Mary Smith’s data is spread across your CRM, DMP, email platform, etc., it might take days or weeks to even assemble her full profile, much less clean it and ensure it’s accurate. 

But with Omeda’s CDP, all it takes is one search to pull up Mary Smith’s full profile. Since the data has already undergone data hygiene and standardization processes, the customer profile is already complete, understandable and ready for Mary Smith to see. Besides checking the boxes of the GDPR, this also goes a long way toward earning your customers’ trust and loyalty.  

2. Fulfill deletion requests more quickly

With a CDP, you can easily remove customer records from your database without sacrificing the integrity of your database. Our CDP removes customer data from our system by permanently anonymizing the record while leaving the integrity of the data intact. TLDR: The record can no longer be linked to an individual, but it can still be used to evaluate the success of specific campaigns.  

3. Restrict access to sensitive customer information

When data is spread across multiple software, a lot more people have access to personally identifiable information. This multiplies your vulnerability to data breaches and other cybersecurity risks. By centralizing your customer data into one source, CDPs limit the amount of people with access to PII.    

4. Enforce cross-channel permissions

The data used from your CDP is used to execute marketing campaigns across all channels. So if you store your customers’ marketing consent and permissions in their CDP profile, it can be instantly applied to your segmentation rules. This way, customers that have opted out of specific communications aren’t added to campaigns that otherwise would have targeted them.   

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