My quarterly reflections on the data privacy industry (Q1 2024)

Hi,

I am Romain Gauthier, CEO and co-founder at Didomi . Going forward, I will share news about Didomi every quarter here on LinkedIn to present my views and insights on the company milestones, the latest industry trends, and where I see data privacy going over the next quarter.

Expert and market insights for 2024?

As decision-makers and privacy professionals face continuous uncertainty, we decided to help our community by inviting experts from around our industry to share what they believed would be the biggest trends of the year. We compiled these insights from figures like Max Schrems , Luiza Jarovsky , or Alexandre Nderagakura in a whitepaper available on our website, which garnered great contributions and conversations.

It is to be determined whether these predictions will still ring true in a few months!?

At Didomi, we are convinced that a data-driven approach is the best way to overcome the many obstacles on the journey toward a great privacy-first experience for users. We closed the quarter by releasing our yearly consent collection benchmark, in which we share aggregated data from our flagship Consent Management Platform (CMP) to help organizations better understand their privacy performance.?

The paper was once again a great success and highlighted very interesting numbers, some of which I was particularly surprised about:

• The 2024 best-performing industry in terms of opt-in rates is the automobile industry, with 64.5%
• There is no correlation between the number of vendors and the notice performance when this number is displayed on the first layer of the notice
• Consent rate uplift is +34% when using a pop-up cookie wall banner to request consent change

I am excited to continue observing the evolution of consent collection, particularly as landmark regulations such as the DMA and the DSA are coming into effect. To access the full whitepaper, head to our website.

Main industry news from Q1 2024

2024 has started at an incredibly fast pace as we are seeing complex and fundamental privacy questions making progress in the law, in courts, and among the ecosystem. Here are some of the biggest developments of the last few months, in my opinion.

Paywalls and the Meta/NOYB case

Unlike many aspects of privacy, everyone has an opinion on the question of Paywalls, and this may explain why they have continued to be one of the most debated privacy questions this quarter.?

It fundamentally questions the conditions of freely given consent. Is your consent valid from a GDPR compliance standpoint when you’re offered to pay or accept that your personal data will be processed to finance the content and service you’re accessing? Is privacy a fundamental right, or is your data a valid currency?

Next to the legal and philosophical debate, it clearly raises the question of the actual value of personal data as the internet currency. Is 9.99€/month too much to pay for accessing a large social network??

Looking at the question from a user's attention perspective, it may be paradoxically a very cheap amount to pay when some spend more time on these platforms than at work. Yet, no one seems willing to pay for this kind of service, which should logically lead to users preferring to give up on their privacy rather than budgeting for this service. It’s what we are seeing in the data at Didomi for publishers who have established similar paywalls.

In any case, this paywall question has the potential to further transform the internet by consolidating the position of large platforms at the expense of other publishers and media, which many believe is the opposite of what the GDPR was meant to achieve.?

How to get out of this dead end? Many people believe that micro-payments/transactions could save the internet, but here again, Google has a plan as it pushes for new standards around web monetization.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA)?

This brings us to a topic that also made headlines in Q1: the Digital Markets Act (DMA).?

Europe’s attempt to limit the influence of large platforms has been a point of focus in 2024 so far. Unlike the GDPR, it’s been largely unnoticed by end-users (no cookie banners appearing overnight!), yet it is forcing many changes behind the scenes that have kept privacy professionals busy for a good portion of the quarter. The changes pushed by Google in Q1 come first to mind. We have seen a flurry of announcements ranging from the Google Consent Mode v2 push to the deprecation of 3rd party cookies in Chrome and its corollary, the privacy sandbox initiatives.?

It’s interesting to observe that the EU regulatory push is forcing Google to dramatically adapt its way of handling and processing personal data (Consent Mode v2), shifting increasingly towards modeling for its analytics and reporting solutions. This new de facto standard for passing consent to Google forces brands and advertisers to revisit their CMP configuration. Other key marketing programs, such as their CRM onboarding practices within large platforms, will now require brands to prove and, therefore, assume full responsibility for the consent they collected for this data processing on the Google platform.?

We can safely expect that more of these changes will come as other large internet platforms get scrutinized by the EU.

The IAB TCF vs. Belgian DPA (APD) legal battle

Another key highlight of the quarter was the CJEU ruling on the key questions raised as part of the IAB Europe vs. APD legal case.?

While it triggered a guerilla war of press releases by opposing parties to win over the public with the best narrative, this decision comes as a welcoming clarification of roles and responsibilities. The bottom line from Didomi's point of view is that this will likely solidify the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF).?

For those who are completely unfamiliar with the case or lost, we’ve assembled many resources to help you understand what it means and what will happen next. The good news is that most of the required changes were shipped with the TCF v2.2 that went live last fall.

The TCF tells an interesting story about the need and value of standards around consent and privacy on the Internet. In a way, standards and privacy regulations are two sides of the same coin. The TCF has established some interesting premises that we anticipate will be expanded globally around the GPP initiative from IAB .?

Closing words and plans for Q2

It’s very interesting to put these Q1 events in perspective as we can clearly see how intricated the notions of privacy and large internet platforms are. We can safely expect that other gatekeepers than Google will become more active in solidifying their DMA/DSA compliance in the coming quarters.

As 3rd party cookie deprecation seems to be happening and has started to be seriously considered by marketers, we are anticipating 3 main privacy themes for the coming quarters:

• A pivot towards server-side tagging and integration for companies to regain control of data collection and distribution
• A focus on personal data exchange/enrichment through privacy-enhancing technologies
• More attention on consent fatigue and its solution, consent orchestration, to help companies improve their consent metrics through better privacy UX

It’s exciting, and I look forward to updating you at the end of the next quarter on the progress made on all these fronts and the many surprises we may have in the coming quarter!