• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 19, 2018

Microsoft and Namogoo jointly developed a software model allowing brands, businesses and publishers to track third- and fourth-party services collecting and sharing customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) from their websites.

The service, in compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations, also identifies the parameters of the data being collected and shared, and then sends an alert about the risks associated with the compliance under the GDPR guidelines.

While many GDPR-compliance packages enable companies to better manage personal data collected from customers on their sites, this new model puts the focus on personal customer data collected by third parties.

In June, Politico ran an opinion piece written by Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, debating the reasons why Silicon Valley needs to get behind privacy and call for a national privacy law.

“The United States does not have a single, overarching national privacy law to protect consumer information online," Benioff wrote. “Instead, we are starting to see proposals in different states that would create a patchwork of 50 different sets of regulations.”

The collaboration between Microsoft and Namagoo remains part of a business and technology partnership that could support the California Privacy bill when it takes effect in 2020. Namogoo is best known for software that blocks unauthorized ads injected into web sessions that can redirect consumers to competitor sites.

GDPR applies to all U.S. companies that accept website traffic from people within the European Union.

Regulations state that online businesses and publishers are responsible for the personal data their third-party vendors collect from their sites, according to the two companies.

Data and privacy management company TrustArc and Dimensional Research surveyed 600 IT and legal professionals in the U.S., UK and EU on their state of compliance. The study ran one month after the May 25, GDPR deadline. The results: only 20% of companies surveyed believe they were GDPR compliant, about 66% in the U.S. and 73% in the UK.