• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 14, 2023

Data-privacy scores are slowly making their way into media-buying strategies, but many data providers, publishers, platforms and brands have not kept up with the growing list of U.S. state level data-privacy regulations, according to data released Thursday from Neutronian, which provides data-privacy and data-quality verification.

In fact, only 15% of the more than 5,500 companies Neutronian reviewed for its updated Data Privacy Scores (DPS) for Q3 2023 mention state privacy laws that have become active this year in Virginia, Colorado, and Connecticut.

Based on the newly released data, Lisa Abousaleh, CEO and co-founder of Neutronian, urges companies to implement more inclusive data-privacy practices, offering all consumers the same protections and rights regardless of which state they live in.

Neutronian enabled its DPS for campaign targeting and analysis, similar to how brand safety is used to mitigate risk before the campaign runs, and verify campaign delivery after.

“We are in the process of lining up agencies to test this out, and see a lot of potential for these applications,” Abousaleh said.

One of those companies is Causal IQ. Jennifer Laing, vice president of operations at Causal IQ, said mitigating data-privacy risk is a growing concern for its clients and an area the company looks to address, so it’s considering implementing the DPS score in its campaign targeting strategy to ensure campaign run safe and reduce the risk of crossing lines of state-based laws.

“Many companies continue to take an exclusionary approach to consumer data-privacy controls, only offering the option to exercise access, correct, delete or opt out of data sales to consumers living in California or at best the states with active laws,” Abousaleh said.

As privacy regulations change, it becomes increasingly important for agencies and advertisers to verify that partners are prepared.

Neutronian also has scored more than 2,000 new publishers in the latest release to provide scale and coverage needed for the new use cases. The plan is to continue this growth in the segment of datasets.

Using DPS scores, buyers can exclude inventory partners that have not implemented current data-privacy standards from their campaigns.

Through integrations with measurement platforms such as TAG TrustNet, buyers are able to review and make optimizations to further mitigate data-privacy risk during their campaigns.

TAG TrustNet was created to provide marketers with more transparency into how campaign spend is being allocated and allow them to make optimization decisions based on factors such as data privacy.

The Neutronian Data Privacy Scores verify and rank companies and domains based on an assessment of data privacy.

The scores are generated based on a review of the publicly available data about each entity.

Examples of the types of data reviewed include a company’s Privacy Policy, privacy regulation such as GDPR and CCPA disclosures, opt-out and DSAR processes, sensitive information disclosures, and company background details.