Janrain offers one of the first GDPR portals for consumer data management

GDPR is coming.

And today, identity management provider Janrain is launching one of the first solutions for brands to manage consumer data after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect about a year from now.

GDPR stipulates that consumers control and must provide explicit consent for use of their personal data, including behavioral data like which sites they visit. It applies to any company marketing or providing services to European Union (EU) citizens, wherever they live — which means essentially every company of any size, since they all have some EU citizens in their marketing sphere.

Although it still remains to be seen how strictly GDPR will be enforced outside of the EU, it could dramatically alter digital marketing and advertising in those countries. And it could have a substantial impact in the US and other non-EU markets.

Janrain provides social login capabilities for about 2,100 companies. That’s the infrastructure that asks you, when you visit a Janrain-enabled site, if you’d like to log in using your username and password from Facebook, Twitter or other social sites. You are also asked to which portions of that social profile you will allow access by the site you are logging onto.

Janrain’s new Consent Lifecycle Management does something similar. Designed specifically to provide a centralized way of managing all those fine-grained GDPR-required consumer data consents, it offers a series of screens displaying consent options for various kinds of data and contexts for which you, the user, agree. Here’s a sample screen:

The data can be integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and it is also designed to accommodate the EU’s Payment Services Directive and Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Consumers can revisit the screens at any time and modify their permissions, and they can download a PDF version reflecting their approvals.

Of course, having to select all those permissions on all the sites and apps you visit could become a major user experience nightmare, and it calls out for some type of centralized digital identity wallet. But Janrain Director of Product Marketing Sven Dummer told me that Janrain’s objective here is to answer the immediate needs of its client sites, each of which wanted their own identity management portal.

Dummer added that a portable “permissions wallet” is on Janrain’s 2019 roadmap, although there’s an obvious “chicken-and-egg” problem: “Companies don’t want to accept self-managed identities unless lots of people are using them [and] customers don’t want to create an identity that has no utility.”