Openprise becomes GDPR-compliant

Openprise makes its living by helping businesses manage data, such as onboarding and cleansing data that has been received from multiple sources.

This week, the data orchestration platform became another GDPR-compliant data manager with the launch of several features meeting the requirements of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in the spring.

VP of Marketing Allen Pogorzelski told me that about 10 percent of his company’s 30 corporate customers are in the EU, but he expects that number to be much higher by the time GDPR Day — May 25 — rolls around.

The new features are:

• the ability to make sure that user data doesn’t get accidentally turned over to third-party providers, and to control which data gets shared with partners, like agencies. This includes data cleansing to guard against the possibility that typos could inadvertently let EU user data out to the wrong parties.
• the ability to determine which users are from EU nations, even if the country data is missing. This is accomplished by assessing the origin of other available data, such as email address, IP address or phone number.
• detailed reporting showing an audit trail of all data processing.

Pogorzelski pointed out that his company’s new features are intended to work around a potential Catch-22 in GDPR: how to determine if a user is based in the EU, without violating their data privacy rights by doing so.

As an example, he said, a marketer in a booth might scan the badge of a conference attendee but discover later that the attendee’s country was not received in the scan.

Currently, said marketer might typically add some third-party data to fill in the country field across attendees, but GDPR prohibits that. Instead, the new Openprise features will look for country identification from the available data, such as email address.