A Love Letter About Data Privacy, From a Digital Marketer

As a Digital Marketer at a company with 31 locations established or underway, you realize on an exponential scale just how much data changes how people do business.

There are the harmless emails that help you pick out your next pair of shoes that you’ve been drooling over for a week and the casual “don’t forget you left this in your cart” kind of notifications.

But then there’s the dark side of data scraping that leads telemarketers and businesses you never even knew about knocking on your door…AKA calling you on your phone 24/7 because they have a new software or tool that pulls all of your information (even when you’ve redacted it from your profiles altogether).

These days, work and life are blended. We use our personal cell phones to take calls and respond to emails. But for me, as a Digital Marketer there comes a time when enough is enough.

Data privacy is key and right now not many people can guarantee that the information you provide to them isn’t being shipped somewhere else or being slid under the table inside a Terms & Conditions.

Sure, mistakes and things happen with data. But so many companies are now going over the edge of fun messaging about what you looked at yesterday online and into a gray world where opt-in and consent are (legally or illegally?) not required…

As a someone who uses some level of data (99% unidentifiable to the specific person unless given opt-in confirmation) for campaigns at work, I realize that you can no longer pursue the people that don’t know you without doing some due diligence. And that’s not picking up the phone and calling them out of the blue, without consent, or attempting to throw a sales pitch into an ambiguous channel that’s hard to track and report.

As we continue to live an increasingly digital world, we have to call it quits on some data points and pieces. It sucks in terms of tracking for most of us in this space professionally, but it is worth the extra work to ensure we’re all on the same playing field and not being taken advantage of.

I am 100% for Consumer-First Data, data opted-in and known about by the consumer, with the options to opt-out entirely without fear of being dragged into months and months of sales emails.?

With these changes, it’ll put a lot of people on the spot. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram…a lot of which are already feeling the affects of iOS changes and app tracking. But for me, I would happily recreate a strategy to ensure we’re all on the same page, feel more at ease when we step into our inbox each morning, and overall have a better experience that aligns with our blended work + personal lives.

So from me, a digital marketer who relies on cookies like the rest of the industry, I say...farewell to the old ways and welcome to the new!