Privacy Compliance Teams are Swamped… But Help Is On the Way.

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February 17, 2025

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Once upon a time, digital privacy compliance was a niche industry; a mostly reactive service specializing in mopping up messes after data breaches or other privacy problems. 

Today it’s a different story. Consumers demand more proactive control over their personal information, and regulatory bodies are giving them what they want. Unfortunately, they are doing so in a decentralized and fragmented way—especially in the U.S., where privacy laws vary widely across states. 

As we’ve explored in the past, this reality has made privacy compliance a daunting task for global businesses. It has also helped spur an unprecedented demand for proactive privacy compliance teams. 

Whether they are deployed internally or externally via third-party legal firms, these compliance teams have become indispensable partners, helping organizations navigate the labyrinthine rules and regulations governing data protection. 

Dollars and data

Data privacy consulting services now represent a multi-billion-dollar industry in the U.S., with explosive growth forecasted over the next decade. This has led some of the nation’s leading law firms to launch their own dedicated global privacy practices, along with a cast of new boutique firms focusing solely on privacy law. 

There’s just one problem—the demand for these new services is outpacing the supply of talent. In fact, privacy compliance teams have never been busier than they are right now, making for some very busy days… and nights… and weekends. 

The need for efficiency has never been greater, leading to the rise of digital tools such as Consent Management Platforms (CMPs). These tools help lighten the load by automating the process of requesting, storing and managing user permissions/consents. 

For instance, when a cookie banner on a website asks a visitor if their data can be shared for advertising purposes, a CMP automatically records this user’s choices. It then transmits those parameters to advertisers, who should theoretically be using them to determine who gets served an ad, and who doesn’t. 

These tools are undoubtedly helpful, but they are not infallible. In fact, they are often held back by a few key hurdles, including: 

  • Internal CMP failures
    Unfortunately, up to 37 percent of CMP consent signals fail to properly log user privacy choices. One publisher we worked with had a 51 percent failure rate! These “dark signals” result in unauthorized data sharing and constitute clear compliance risks. They also defeat the purpose of automation, since a tool that only works half the time can be worse than no tool at all. 
  • Bad external transmissions
    Even when a CMP collects data accurately, the process often breaks down when user choices get broadcast out into the ad ecosystem. Maybe the message never makes it to the advertisers. Maybe they misunderstand or ignore the data. Whatever the reasons, targeted ads routinely end up in front of users who have opted out. Meanwhile, users who have opted in are getting added to “do not target” lists by mistake. The former is a compliance issue; the latter is a missed revenue opportunity—both are problems. 
  • Lack of real-time auditing
    When regulators or plaintiffs probe a business’s privacy compliance, they aren’t interested in what the CMP is “supposed” to be doing; they only care about the results. This puts the onus on compliance teams—not only to ensure their CMPs are functioning properly but to confirm user choices are actually being recorded and respected by advertisers. 

The next generation of automation

Here at Boltive, we studied these problems carefully. Then we got to work on the solution. 

It’s called Privacy Guard, and it works alongside CMPs to create a system that goes looking for trouble, instead of waiting for a busy compliance team—or an eager litigator—to stumble across the mess. 

Leveraging Boltive’s patented persona technology, Privacy Guard creates  a set of unique AI users, or “personas.” Next, it sends each one on a specific customer journey through a website or mobile app, such as shopping, creating an account, or searching for a job. Then, Privacy Guard captures and analyzes every digital tracker each persona encounters, such as pixels, tags, cookies or SDKs. Finally, Privacy Guard evaluates every single ad served. 

The resulting data provides a proactive analysis of your entire compliance ecosystem, from the performance of your own CMP to the behavior of your ad partners. 

It’s an elegant and powerful solution to the problems that have plagued compliance automation thus far. It also helps compliance teams work better and faster than ever before. 

Want to see for yourself?