How to manage consent enforcement with Twilio Segment

Customer trust is at the heart of a privacy-first approach to customer engagement. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Consent Enforcement in Connections is generally available for all Business Tier customers! With this new capability, you can now integrate with any Consent Management Platform (CMP) for collecting your end-users’ consent preferences, and enforce consent in any supported downstream application. 

Consent management at Twilio Segment

For years, Twilio Segment has helped thousands of companies streamline data governance and manage compliance with regulations like GDPR, CPRA, Schrems II, and HIPAA. The increasing awareness and global adoption of data privacy laws have naturally led to a strong emphasis on safeguarding consumer data privacy across browsers, apps, and devices. 

To comply with many of the aforementioned data privacy laws, companies are required to obtain consent from end-users using their website or app. This consent permits companies to use the end-user's data for specific purposes, such as advertising, personalization, and essential site functionality. 

While many companies have solved for consent collection, we understand that consent enforcement can be an even bigger challenge to tackle. That’s why we offer a holistic consent management solution to include support for:

1. Collecting consent preference from your end-users

2. Enforcing the end-user consent preferences in Segment Connections 

3. Opt-In/Out to supported channels in Twilio Engage, such as email, SMS or WhatsApp 

Collecting consent preferences

Segment’s consent management strategy starts on the end-user device. Your chosen CMP prompts both logged in (registered) and anonymous users to provide their consent preferences and captures those choices. Your CMP could be either bespoke, open source, or commercial off-the-shelf, like OneTrust, Transcend or Ketch.

After your CMP captures the end-user’s consent, stamp each Segment event with the end-user’s current consent preferences. If you use OneTrust, Segment provides an out-of-the-box wrapper that stamps every event for you. 

Segment’s consent object needed on events to enforce consent.

Enforcing Consent in Segment Connections

When you first configure consent management in the Segment app, you’ll create consent categories that align with those you previously configured in your CMP. Then you map destinations in your workspace to one or more of these categories. Segment Connections will automatically enforce consent and ensure only those end-user’s data is delivered to destinations that are mapped to the categories the end-user consented to.

Mapping consent categories with Destinations to enforce consent. 

Enforcing Communication Preferences

As part of Engage Premier, Twilio Segment offers communication preferences or subscriptions. Twilio Segment associates subscription states with each email address and phone number via Segment Identify events, traits or data uploader. Subscription states indicate the level of consent end-users have given to receive your marketing campaigns with the ability to go granular using subscription groups. 

But what about my right to be forgotten?

Under several data privacy laws, end-users do have the right to request erasure of their data collected and shared. Twilio Segment already offers the out-of-the-box ability to delete and suppress data about your end-users at scale. 

Getting Started

If you’re interested in learning more about Twilio Segment’s Consent Management, check out our documentation, or request a demo to see how you can get started today!