Consentless Sever-Side Tracking
The Consent Problem No One Wants to Talk About
I’ve been selling and talking about consentless analytics for several years now. I’m leaving this content as a guide, because very few people talk about it — it’s not in anyone’s interest to do so.
We saw it in the previous post. Attribution as they sell it to us is dead — don’t burn your money.
Now the buzzword is Server-Side Tracking. The thing is, whatever Google wants to push, everyone will talk about — then the rest of us humans follow, especially those selling implementations to keep the wave from crashing down.
I have nothing against Server-Side Tracking, nor against any technology that respects privacy and regulations. That said:
Server-Side tracking, as we know it, requires consent!
This is the pain point. We’ve spent years — I repeat, years — thinking that being able to measure without consent is a technology problem. It’s the complete opposite!
Measuring without consent is a regulatory matter. The regulation says it very clearly:
I don’t care about the technology.
You cannot measure individuals, because this means there’s a possibility of identifying that person.
And on point 2, let me give you a very clear example for Server-Side lovers.
If tomorrow the data protection authority in your country shows up and asks you to pop the hood on your database and run the following query:
“Show me all hits in chronological order for SessionID X — the one that nobody knows, no one can tell who it belongs to.”
If your query returns results, IT REQUIRES CONSENT.
Got it?
In other words:
If our technology is capable of measuring a user individually — even anonymously — IT REQUIRES CONSENT.
The million-dollar question:
So how does SealMetrics manage to attribute conversions to traffic sources?
Ah, my friend! That’s where SealMetrics’ value lies.
But since Unmodeled isn’t the place to talk about SealMetrics, let’s complement this post with more Rock n’ Roll. Here’s a list of tracking technologies showing whether each one requires consent or not, and why!
Enjoy! Next time someone tries to sell you on “this is the future… it doesn’t require consent…” — send them this list and tell them… HA!
I put together the ultimate tracking consent cheat sheet — 40+ technologies, whether they need consent, and the legal reason why. Next time someone tries to sell you the 'no consent needed' dream… just send them thi