Safe Harbor is dead. What does that mean for your customer insights & analytics practices?
Yesterday morning, many of us in the United States awoke to some troubling news: the European Court of Justice (ECJ) had ruled that the Safe Harbor agreement is no longer valid. Security & risk (S&R) and data management folks kicked into high gear. Customer insights and digital marketing teams…? Well, the news slipped past mostly unnoticed. That's a mistake.
Let's start with a primer on Safe Harbor. If you're a multinational company doing business in Europe, Safe Harbor is the agreement under which you've been allowed to bring European customers' data back into your servers in the US for purposes of targeting, analytics, campaign management, etc. If you work with a US-based database MSP, digital or CRM agency to manage customer data, they've likely been relying on the same agreement. It's a nearly 20-year old agreement that was put in place to bridge the gap between Europe's strict data protection laws and America's relative dearth of them.
Now, that agreement has been deemed invalid, which means that every company serving European customers needs to reexamine its data practices. Of course, this is primarily the purview of our technology management peers. But customer insights professionals need to partner closely with them on two fronts:
