An ad buyer at a leading media agency, who did not have permission to speak to media on this topic, said DataGrail’s findings were in line with the internal DSRs received in the last 12 months.
However, Horizon Media received less than 10% of such requests in the U.S. for this period, including opt-out requests from consumers.
“I am shocked at the 72%,” said Laura McElhinney, chief data officer at Horizon Media. “That could be because our consented data is mostly with loyalty programs. When you have a client that’s offering value, then the consumers are more likely to consent to the brand using their data.”
The report found that 52% of the privacy requests came from outside of California, including states that are yet to implement a privacy law. Most global companies tend to have a ubiquitous DSR link at the bottom of their homepage, even in regions without privacy laws.
“This tells you that the awareness of privacy and the expectation that it will increase is definitely there,” said Barber.
DataGrail’s dataset includes information from companies of all sizes, from startups to publicly traded household names.
Deletion requests rise
In 2022, the request to delete people’s data held by companies outpaced the request to access their data, per the report. For every access request, there were 56% more deletion requests.
Barber suspects that any time a company sends an email alerting their customers about their updated privacy policy, it reminds people of how their data is used, spurring them to carry out an access, delete or opt-out request.
Costs and investment
The cost of processing a DSR—deletion or access—doubled from 2021 to 2022, per the report. It costs approximately $1,524 for a company to manually process a single DSR, according to Gartner, via DataGrail.
The cost of manually processing access and deletion requests could cost companies $648,000 per 1 million identities. This is an increase of $409,000 per 1 million identities from 2021, per the DataGrail report.
“On average, we see about 26 people involved in processing one privacy request,” said Barber.
Horizon Media’s investments in technology and automation to process privacy requests helps it manage these costs.
“Many companies haven’t invested in that technology yet and are manually having to manage [requests],” said McElhinney. “And that is very costly and time-consuming.”
Transparency is key
As the industry moves to solutions to counter signal loss, such as data clean rooms, handling people’s data, anonymization practices and utilizing it safely and competently is foundational regardless of the technology, McElhinney said.