Consent banners were once the sole domain of the Marketing team. But as privacy enforcement increasingly emphasized opt-out compliance, things shifted. Consent is now an essential bedrock for any privacy program. While more stakeholders and increased technical scrutiny can make the project feel daunting, standing up a consent management platform (CMP) is an important opportunity to build a resilient and impactful compliance posture beyond the banner.
For Mike Bittner, General Counsel at GotSport, consent was a visible milestone to privacy excellence. With closer regulation of children’s data on the horizon and an increasingly complicated international regulatory landscape, consent was so much more than a box to check on GotSport’s ISO/IEC audit.
A basic banner could be stood up in a few hours with DataGrail’s no-code Google Tag Manager integration. But Bittner didn’t just want consent optics, he wanted to pressure test the consent experience and ensure it held up to the strictest examination. For a consent management platform to genuinely work and pass an investigator’s review, Bittner approached implementation as a culture exercise.
To make true, meaningful, improvements in your compliance posture, follow Bittner’s guide:
Embrace the technical nature of the project
Your banner will allow users to decide what, if any, trackers they permit your website to fire during their browsing session. Sounds simple, right? But there’s so much that needs to happen in the background to make that a reality, if you gloss over the technical part of implementing consent management, you leave your compliance at risk.
As Bittner puts it, “Regulators care about consent outcomes, not aesthetics. Either consent signals work, or they do not. You can’t hide this, and the risk is so high if you get it wrong.”
Privacy is more technical now than it ever has been, and consent is no exception. While working on this project, you’ll learn what cookies actually are, how to find them, and how they’re intercepted. Don’t shy away from it, embrace it!
For larger organizations, you may find hundreds to thousands of uncategorized cookies live in your environment. Depending on your rule settings, each one of those uncategorized cookies could be a demand letter risk. Every cookie will need to be understood and categorized to ensure its handling aligns with user (and regulator) expectations.
In Bittner’s case, GotSport used DataGrail’s wildcard cookie settings to apply relevant categories to hundreds of cookies at once and keep cookies sorted at scale.
Build partnerships within and beyond your organization
If your privacy team comes from a legal background like GotSport’s, you’ll likely partner with a more technical colleague on the project. For Bittner, that was Aaron Wilmoth, GotSport’s Chief Information Officer.
Wilmoth installed DataGrail Consent, while Bittner was responsible for categorizing cookies and configuring policies. Wilmoth could also help add important technical context as the implementation progressed. Working together on this project also set Bittner and Wilmoth up to partner well on other privacy goals later.
For the best success, your tech partner needs to be a genuine partner on this project. Bittner explained, “If you want your consent management platform to really work, there is no perfect and easy out-of-the-box solution. We spread out our implementation into smaller steps and met with DataGrail every week to work on our goals together. That 1:1 time makes a huge difference. On top of that, our support rep was always there when we needed him.”
Go above and beyond for your customers
While DataGrail Consent lets you configure a potentially endless number of policy options and layouts aligned with new privacy laws and best practices, Bittner recommends keeping your policies simple.
“Treat your users the same, regardless of their jurisdiction. You lose credibility and trust with your customers if you refuse their browser opt-out signals or deny them a choice, even if that’s technically your right in their jurisdiction. Customers won’t understand why you didn’t offer a choice, and you don’t want them to feel used.”
This isn’t just generosity, it’s also an important strategy for a lean team to stay ahead of constantly changing regulations. California was the first state to require businesses to honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals in 2020, and so far at least four other states have followed suit. Similarly, GDPR inspired many other regions from Brazil to Japan to mandate opt-out compliance.
Inspire your next challenge
You’re going to learn a lot about who at your organization is processing data and for what while implementing consent. It’s natural to segway your implementation into updating your Record of Processing Activities (RoPA) or building out integrations for data subject request management.
“You can’t solve every problem at once, but cookie consent is a great entry point to build relationships and set the bar,” says Bittner.
Finding surprises in your cookies can help you discover a critical question needed in your risk assessments, a team that needs support thinking through data minimization on their processing activities, or another system that needs to be addressed during deletion requests. Let your CMP implementation inspire where to take your privacy roadmap next. When you get there, you’ll arrive more informed and with partners ready to support you in the work ahead.
Final takeaways
If GotSport’s story is any example, you can take it easy with a simple consent installation, but taking the time to truly understand your implementation and be sure of your compliance is always worth it. If you’re hoping to accomplish the same, also explore these resources:
- How to Build a Fully Compliant Cookie Consent Program
- Consent Checker: Confirm Your Opt-Out Compliance
- Cookie Consent Style Guide & Best Practices: How to Design Banners Without Dark Patterns
- My Approach to Consent Management as a Digital Marketer
- Sportsman’s Warehouse: Delivering Verifiable Consent When it Counts
- Consent Management with DataGrail
- OneTrust vs. DataGrail Cookie Consent
