A year after the European Union rolled out the privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation, the location-data firm Factual is getting ready to expand in Europe.
The location-data firm is one of a handful of advertising and marketing tech firms that shut down part of their European business ahead of the data-collection law being enforced. GDPR requires businesses to explicitly get internet users’ consent before collecting their data for ad targeting. Data firms that use location stats from smartphones have been a particular target of scrutiny under the law.
Factual scrapped its European database and stopped offering advertisers its targeting, measurement, and insight products. Developers and publishers send location data from apps to Factual that advertisers then use to create audience segments for targeting and measuring campaigns. The firm said it cut more than half of the providers it worked with (which it didn’t name) and was relaunching its products in Europe.
To spearhead the expansion, Factual hired Ross Webster as managing director of Europe. Webster was previously the EMEA head of data partnerships at IBM’s Watson Advertising.
The company has a small office in London with seven employees, and Ross said that by the first quarter of 2020 Factual would sell all of its products to European advertisers and operate in a handful of markets in continental Europe.
“There’s a pent-up desire for quality location data within Europe,” he said.
Factual slashed its data partners
The firm has also put together a GDPR compliance program for partners, including an auditing process and new terms and agreements in contracts. Before a partner supplies location data to Factual, the company’s privacy team vets a partner’s process of collecting data to make sure that it meets GDPR’s requirements. Partners also undergo audits on an ongoing basis, though Factual did not provide further details about the timing of audits.
“We feel like we’re in a position where we can make available these three products within Europe built off of a pool of responsibly-sourced data,” said Brian Czarny, the chief marketing officer of Factual. “We’ll continue to add additional suppliers as we feel like there are others in the market that are ready to do that.”
Scale is often a challenge for marketers with location-based advertising, but Czarny said that wiping its European database to build it again from scratch put a bigger focus on collecting high-quality data.
“We don’t expect for the scale to reach pre-GDPR volume,” he said.
Factual is trying to get ahead of US privacy regulation
Factual said it hoped that its work over the past year would help it prepare for the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act that is set to take effect in January and has similar restrictions as GDPR’s on how marketers collect and use data.
A crop of privacy-minded firms are helping marketers comply with CCPA.
While CCPA and GDPR aren’t identical, both require marketers to show consumers what data they collect and delete it if a consumer requests for it to be deleted.
“What we’re doing with GDPR gives us a solid foundation to be ready for upcoming regulation like CCPA,” Czarny said.
