You’re on your own when it comes to privacy

When everything connects to everything the risk is that data ends up in platforms for which customers never have given their consent. Think of data captured under analytics consent that's being streamed to marketing and advertising platforms.

Interestingly the vendors consider the lack of guardrails none of their responsibility while everyone is proud of their downstream steaming capabilities. When asked about it (I have :-)) everyone seems to be pointing towards the data warehouse as "the central point where the problem should be managed".

When a vendor says they're privacy centric but state that "privacy should be handled in the data warehouse" what they're saying is "you're on your own". It's a nice way of saying "solve it yourself".

Bottom line - Don't pay too much attention to privacy positioning of vendors. It's a topic that needs to be mentioned and requires some checkboxes from a gtm perspective. Very few are able to actually provide extensive guardrails. Ensure you have your own processes to put guardrails on how data gets piped from one tool to another. Cause you are really on your own.