Consent categories

This guide introduces you to consent categories and explains how to configure them in Bloomreach.

Overview

Consent categories allow you to manage and organize data into multiple categories, each with a different consent status and a different approach to data processing and communication.

Categories let you approach each of your customers in the way that the specific customer consented or for which they have a legitimate interest. There are three types of categories available in Bloomreach:

Category type	Use
General consent	This is a system setting in Bloomreach that allows you to send campaigns to all your customers, even without consents, or those who have already opted out. This is only to allow you to send transactional emails or important warnings, and it needs to be used carefully.
Consent	As per GDPR, consent has to be freely and actively given by a customer. You can define multiple consent categories (such as "Newsletter", "Push notifications", and so on). Consents need to be tracked/imported for every customer.
Legitimate interest	Processing data under legitimate interest is more flexible in comparison to the active consents. It enables you to process personal data without actively asking your customers to provide consent. Hence, in Bloomreach, you can define a legitimate interest group by creating an automatic filter based on a customer's behavior (such as having a purchase)

Configure categories

Create and configure consent categories in Project settings > Privacy management > Consents.

Then, select from these categories in the settings of each campaign you are about to launch. This ensures that you show, for example, a push notification only to customers who have given you the appropriate consent.

Select a consent category in the settings of each campaign. — Choose the category you want to apply in the settings of each campaign

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Important
To delete a consent category that does not have a bin icon, you need to go to Data Manager > Mapping to check the mapping of the affected categories. The delete button (bin icon) will be visible once you uncheck the boxes in that section, leaving empty boxes.

The following section goes over each of the 3 main consent categories and how you can configure them.

Configure tracking consent categories

There has been added explanation about the GDPR law in Germany, where accessing all data on a user´s device requires explicit consent. More details about the explicit consent, how to configure the tracking of the consent categories can be found in Configuration of the tracking consent categories.

General consent

General consent should be used only in very few instances. When it is used, customer consent preferences are ignored, and this may result in approaching customers without any legal basis for doing so. Therefore, permission to use the General consent should be very limited.

The best practice is to disable it altogether and re-enable it only for some very specific purposes where you are sure its use is legal and appropriate. In Project settings > Privacy management > Consents, you choose in which channels the General consent can be used.

Choose which channels can use General consent

If you decide to disable a channel, you can also see which of your campaigns and scenarios have been using General consent in 'Check dependencies' so that you know what campaigns need adjustments in their Consent category. General consent will only be disabled after the adjustments to the running campaigns are made.

Check dependencies to identify campaigns using General consent before disabling a channel

Consents

You can create custom consent categories based on the specific consent you received from your customers. It is preferable to have multiple consent categories. Firstly, because different customers will give you consent for different things, and secondly, it is preferable to allow customers to opt-out only from some of your communications they had previously consented to, instead of them withdrawing their consent to all communications.

Create and manage custom consent categories in Privacy management — Create and manage custom consent categories

Setting	Description
Color	Distinguish between consent categories with different colors.
Consent category	This field is used for mapping the consent category to the tracked consent event. This field needs to have the same value as the attribute `category` in the consent event. We recommend using a simple, lowercased word in English for easy troubleshooting. This will not be visible to your customers.
Name	This is a human-readable name of the consent category that is also be visible to your customers on the consent page.
Description	Description of the consent category that will also be visible to your customers on the consent page.
Public API	By default, new consent categories have tracking of consents from the public API disabled. In practice, this means that consent events with property `source=public_api` will be ignored or invalid. We strongly recommend leaving this option disabled, because it is preventing attackers to change user consents at will by obtaining a public API token. As an alternative, we recommend using either consent double opt-in or tracking of consents by API with a private key, which will be tracked as `source=private_api`.

Consent category name translation

If you use the same consent categories for multi-language audiences, you can set up translations for their names so that the correct translation is shown to a particular customer. To set it up, open the consent category as in the image below:

Set up name translations for consent categories used across multiple languages

Legitimate interest

You can apply a legitimate interest to all your customers, or only a specific segment, using the filter in the Applies on column.

Legitimate interest has the same configuration as consents, except for the Applies on in the settings. The remaining ones are the same as in the table above.

Setting Description

Applies on

Setting	Description
Applies on	Use this setting to define on what segment of customers you want to apply this legitimate interest. `All customers` - every customer in Bloomreach has this legitimate Interest `Filtered customers` - only segment of customers defined by filter has the legitimate interest Note that this filter isn't static, but always reflects the actual state based on customers' behavior.

Use this setting to define on what segment of customers you want to apply this legitimate interest.
All customers - every customer in Bloomreach has this legitimate Interest
Filtered customers - only segment of customers defined by filter has the legitimate interest

Note that this filter isn't static, but always reflects the actual state based on customers' behavior.

Opt in/out from a legitimate interest

Customers have an option to opt-in/opt-out from a legitimate interest in the same way as for consent. They are also visible on the consent page.

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Important
Tracking of an explicit consent event containing a legitimate interest consent category will always override the legitimate interest filter.

Updated 2 days ago

What´s next?

Learn how to track consents and opt-outs.