Privacy Compliance Simplified with CHEQ Enforce
Heidi Kim
|Privacy & Compliance | January 17, 2025
Note: CHEQ Privacy Compliance Enforcement is now CHEQ Enforce, hosted by Ensighten. This change offers our customers more features and enhanced control, reflecting our focus on providing you with best-in-class workflows in data security, compliance, and marketing operations. Current CHEQ customers can learn more about this change here.
In today’s data-driven digital ecosystem, businesses rely heavily on user data in order to target marketing, personalize experiences, and make informed decisions. However, staying compliant with data privacy regulations can take a huge toll on resources, especially for organizations managing complex marketing stacks with hundreds or even thousands of vendors.
The increasing enforcement of laws like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has significantly impacted organizations across the spectrum, from software giants like LinkedIn ($335M in October 2024), to e-commerce companies like Sephora ($1.2M in August 2022). In the U.S., 2025 will see the introduction of 7 new state-level privacy protection laws, adding to the 12 already in existence today (IAPP). One leading MarTech publication describes the issue as 19 “different headaches for marketers to deal with” (MarTech).
Data privacy isn’t just about avoiding fines–it’s a strategic priority. Trust drives customer loyalty: 64% of consumers say they would leave a company over data handling concerns (Deloitte). The most successful businesses view privacy as an investment in their long-term viability, ensuring they comply while maintaining customer trust and protecting their bottom line.
Top brands worldwide rely on CHEQ’s unique enforcement solution to automate privacy compliance, so they can focus on building the core products and services that make them great.
Why Conventional Consent Management Falls Short
Since GDPR first went into effect in 2018, several other international and state-level regulations have joined in the first wave of comprehensive data privacy regulations – the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), and Japan’s updated Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) among them. Many businesses took up the task of consent management–standing up cookie banners and pop-ups to collect user consent and supposedly reach compliance. In reality, laws like GDPR require clearing a higher bar–not only do businesses need to uphold and enforce user preferences, but they must do so before and after a user has given a response.
This requirement applies to all user data storage and transfer, not just cookies, as many conventional Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) suggest. Essentially, if you don’t control which user data is stored on your site or sent to vendors and when, a consent banner is just window dressing.
Most conventional CMPs fall short when it comes to helping businesses enforce user privacy preferences. These platforms typically just hand off consent preferences to third-party vendors via APIs or similar mechanisms, resulting in two main burdens on the business:
- Regulatory Risks due to Non-Enforcement: CMPs signal consent preferences to external vendors but do not enforce those preferences directly. This “send and hope” approach creates significant compliance risks, as vendors may mishandle or even ignore the signals. For example, tracking cookies may continue to fire even after users have opted out, violating regulations like GDPR.
- Complexity of Maintenance: CMPs require complex, vendor-specific configurations that must be continuously updated. Businesses must regularly check whether tools are firing properly and failures in this process can result in non-compliance. This ongoing effort becomes especially painful when navigating a complex MarTech stack.
These challenges emphasize the need for a more robust approach to privacy compliance—one that ensures preferences are not just communicated but actively enforced. For more on the client-side tracking requirements of major data privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, PIPL, POPIA, and PDPA) see CHEQ’s prior coverage.
Active Enforcement as a Solution
A truly compliant data privacy solution should stand on its own, enforcing user privacy preferences seamlessly and eliminating dependencies on other systems or manual upkeep. CHEQ Enforce transforms how tracking technologies operate on your website, app, or digital asset by autonomously enforcing user preferences.
With CHEQ Enforce, businesses see several key advantages:
- Real-Time Enforcement: Unlike conventional solutions, Enforce ensures that compliance with GDPR and other laws is upheld directly at the source, without the need for continuous upkeep.
- Time back for Compliance Teams: By automating enforcement processes, Enforce reduces the risk of human error and frees up stakeholders to spend their time adding value to their core business.
- Transparency and Quality for Customers: Enforce enables consent experiences that provide visitors with clear and actionable choices about how their data is collected and used, fully customized for your business’ look and feel.
- Insights for MarTech Strategies: Enforce surfaces trends in user consent, blocked domains, and malicious threats through in-app reports and exports that help businesses make more informed marketing decisions.
- Regulatory Readiness: Enforce provides detailed audit trails to demonstrate compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
- Integration with other Consent APIs: Enforce makes it easy to integrate with APIs like Google Consent Mode, Microsoft Consent Mode, and the IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF).
Who is Active Enforcement Most Useful for?
Privacy compliance is necessary for any organization conducting its business online–the lion’s share of large companies today. Beyond this universal need, active enforcement is particularly valuable for:
- Highly regulated Industries: Sectors like finance, healthcare and education operate under stringent data privacy laws. These industries face severe consequences for non-compliance, making CHEQ’s robust enforcement capabilities critical for safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring adherence to legal standards.
- Merchants or Service Providers: Organizations processing, storing, or transmitting payment card data fall under the scope of PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Active privacy enforcement ensures that data collection is restricted to what is necessary and complies with consent preferences, helping prevent unauthorized tracking or data breaches that could lead to costly penalties.
- Global Enterprises: Companies operating across regions with varying data privacy laws need solutions that deal with this complex patchwork efficiently at scale.
Why now?
Several factors make active privacy compliance enforcement more critical than ever:
- Evolving Privacy Legislation: The 7 new state-level, comprehensive data privacy laws that will come into effect in the U.S. in 2025 alone speak to the complexity of the regulatory landscape facing businesses. Marketing teams must stay ahead of these evolving requirements to avoid penalties and maintain trust.
- Regulatory Scrutiny: Regulatory bodies are imposing record-breaking fines on non-compliant companies, with significant reputational harm accompanying these penalties, as in the cases of LinkedIn and Sephora. The reputational harm caused by regulatory fines is often far-reaching, impacting both consumer trust and investor confidence.
- Consumer Expectations: Consumers today demand greater transparency, control, and trust when it comes to their personal data. The rise of generative AI has amplified these expectations, as individuals become increasingly aware of how their data may be used to train AI models or inform automated decisions.
Getting started with CHEQ Enforce
Implementation is simple—just a single line of code integrates CHEQ across all iterations of your site. Learn more about how leading brands use CHEQ Enforce at https://cheq.ai/customers/ .
To join the global enterprises and Fortune 100 companies benefiting from CHEQ Enforce today, book a call with our team.