My quarterly update as Didomi CEO (Q4 2024)

That’s it. We finally wrapped up 2024, and now is the perfect time for me to share my reflections on last year and predictions for what’s to come in 2025 before the always-busy first quarter fully takes over.

Looking back: Highlights and takeaways from 2024

A great practice to set new objectives is to look back at what worked and what didn’t over the last period. This is particularly interesting in the context of our industry, which moves so fast that it’s easy to gloss over some of our achievements and focus on storming ahead.

On the topic of our work last year, I wrote a comprehensive blog post in December where I covered our most significant achievements at Didomi, but here’s the gist for those of you who want an overview:

• Industry recognition: Didomi was honored to be named a leader once again in G2 reports, to be included in Gartner’s 2024 Market Guide for Consent and Preference Management, and to achieve Gold CMP Partner status in Google’s revamped CMP Partner Program.
• Product innovation and updates: Our team delivered tremendous work to our Global Privacy UX Solutions, from improving our Multi-Regulation CMP (including new capabilities for the U.S.) to deep work on mitigating the impact of our CMP on web performance Core Web Vitals and an increased focus on our compliance monitoring capabilities.
• Big launches: In 2024, we were delighted to unveil our Didomi Academy, a revamped Partner Program, and a new and improved blog where we shared a steady flow of weekly insights.

On the industry side, it was also an exciting year, with Google Consent Mode V2 making waves early in 2024, a plethora of new state laws appearing in the U.S., Consent or Pay emerging as a huge topic, and, of course, the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome taking an unexpected turn.

On a more general note, check out this video we shot at the office last month, where a group of our Didomians join me to reflect on their highlights of 2024:

Looking forward: What’s next for the privacy industry (and for Didomi) in 2025?

Now, I have a few predictions on what we can expect from 2025, keeping the biggest one for last.

Taking a step back: Traceability of consent, opt-out considerations, Article 82

After years of continuous development, data privacy is facing some bottlenecks in scaling and becoming a full pillar of sound and successful data management.?

Like every year in our space, 2024 brought its sum of new topics. One of the most intriguing ones is the new focus set on opt-out, mainly driven by the spirit of many privacy State laws in the US combined with renewed attention to Article 82 of the GDPR, which defines how responsibility is shared between controllers and processors. Opt-out is not easy when personal data is circulated/shared among the various stakeholders of any data value chain. Let’s take adtech as an example where an email collected by a publisher can be shared through the programmatic bid stream with potentially hundreds of recipients. Handling an opt-out effectively suddenly becomes a complex task for any company. What is true for Adtech is true for a lot of other use cases with health data, banking data, retail data, etc.

As Snowflake illustrated in their modern marketing data stack of 2025, privacy is the new baseline for marketers, and consent management is the marketing data foundation. Yet, it is increasingly complex for marketers to scale their marketing programs with this new privacy-centric paradigm.?

Marketers aren’t the only ones facing this challenge. In specific verticals like banking&insurance, commerce&retail, media, etc., there is an increasing realization that better privacy standards are needed to correctly handle the circulation and traceability of consent (out-out as well as opt-in) and privacy requests (access, modify, delete).?

Next to this idea of better protecting personal data when it is shared, there is also a need for better standards when it comes to privacy-enhancing technologies that prove critical to share data and insights without consent, therefore removing the dependency on consent rates, which more and more people realize is a race to the bottom.?

We predict that 2025 will be the year where privacy standards will take a central position in the privacy industry agenda, driven by the various IABs and the IAB Tech Lab (like GPP, TCF, and others), specific standards driven by vertical regulation (like FIDA for financial institutions in Europe) and even company-specific standards (like Google and Microsoft consent modes).?

What about you? What is, in your opinion, the biggest data privacy trend for 2025??

Privacy across the pond: U.S. and data privacy

The United States of America is a fascinating place to look at regarding data privacy, and it promises to continue in 2025.

By the end of this year, around 150 million Americans (close to half the country’s population) will be covered by a state-level privacy law. The current patchwork of state laws, the prospect of a potential federal law down the line (our VP Product Jeff Wheeler shared his thoughts about it last month), and the vibrant political climate with a new president settling in the White House will make it a critical place to watch this year.

A good place to start if you want to learn more is our comprehensive article on the state of data protection in the U.S. Watch this space for more news throughout the year.

Alternatives to cookies: Server-side consent management and privacy-preserving data sharing

2024 was supposed to finally be the year Google would deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. As we now know (and as some predicted, cc Thomas Adhumeau), it ended up not happening, and Google introduced instead what I called a new paradigm for 3rd-party cookies.

However, the fact remains that third-party cookies are bound to become less relevant and that investing in privacy-first alternatives will remain a priority for organizations going forward.

I predict that in 2025, privacy-preserving data sharing, led by technological solutions such as server-side tagging, data clean rooms, or Unique IDs, will continue growing and becoming more relevant than ever.

Final words

I’ll conclude by reiterating my excitement about the new year and thanking all our customers, partners, and collaborators once again for a fantastic 2024.

I am confident that 2025 will bring a ton of stimulating new challenges and opportunities for us all, and I want to ensure the continued commitment from everyone at Didomi to building and delivering world-class solutions to empower global organizations to create compliant user experiences that respect people's choices and strengthen the bonds between brands and customers.?

We take great pride in our reputation as a premium solutions provider and will continue to maintain the highest standards we have been recognized for since 2017. Expect surprises, as we also have very cool innovations on the roadmap! Stay tuned!