Can we run Croct analytics without collecting personal data?
Good morning. I coordinate data protection at a publisher and I am assessing whether we can operate personalization and experiment analytics strictly on behavioral data, with personal attributes never populated.
To be precise about categories: by personal data I mean directly identifying attributes such as name, email address, or telephone number. Behavioral data (pages viewed, session activity, campaign source) we treat separately in our records of processing.
If we never call any identification function, what does a profile then actually contain? And does targeting remain functional on behavioral data alone, or does the product degrade without personal attributes
1 answer
This maps cleanly onto how profiles are structured. Croct profiles hold statistical, behavioral, and personal data as separate categories, and the personal category only exists if you put data there. Attributes like name, email, and phone are populated exclusively through croct.identify and croct.user.edit() calls that your own code makes. If you never call them, profiles stay anonymous behavioral profiles, which is the default state, not a degraded mode.
Targeting does not depend on the personal category at all. Audiences evaluate on first-party signals: behavior, campaign source, location, device, interests. Experiments assign and measure on the same basis. So a condition like session's stats' pageviews > 3 and campaign's medium is "cpc" works identically whether or not a single personal attribute exists anywhere in your workspace.
For your records of processing, the retention side: profiles, sessions, and events are kept within plan-bounded windows (1, 30, or 60 days depending on plan), analytics is kept 90 days on all plans, and profiles inactive for 90 days are deleted. So the behavioral data you do process has documented, bounded lifetimes you can cite directly.