Segment Announces Commitment to GDPR Readiness and New Product Capabilities to Help Businesses Adhere to Upcoming Regulation

The Leading Customer Data Platform Will Help Businesses be GDPR Compliant With New API Method


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - November 16, 2017) - Segment, the customer data platform, today announced new product capabilities that will provide an easier way for businesses to prepare for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become applicable on May 25, 2018. Segment also updated its customer Data Processing Agreement (DPA) to reflect the new requirements of the GDPR.

"We welcome the GDPR and are excited to help our customers comply with the new requirements," said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment. "The Regulation will raise the bar for honoring end users' rights, and is aligned with our values. The GDPR is also likely to reduce businesses' reliance on third-party data sources. Instead, businesses will likely need to leverage their own first-party data to successfully provide a delightful user experience."

The GDPR is a European Union Regulation that will strengthen data privacy laws protecting European Union residents as well as those whose information is processed within the EU. The GDPR will increase the privacy rights of these data subjects and ensure businesses are more transparent when it comes to collecting and using personal data. The laws apply to any business that is established in the EU or any business that processes data of EU residents. This includes companies located outside the EU that supply goods or services to EU residents, or track or monitor EU residents.

For most businesses, the Regulation requires a re-architecting of their customer data infrastructure and reevaluation of vendor commitments. Compliance represents a serious technical challenge because businesses must be able to honor the rights of data subjects, and delete, correct, and suppress individual user data upon request. In fact, according to Gartner, more than 50 percent of companies affected by the GDPR will not be in full compliance by the time the law goes into effect.

Helping Businesses Achieve Compliance

As the central record of customer data, Segment's new features will streamline GDPR compliance for data processed by Segment. To help comply with user requests related to the right to erasure (the right to be forgotten), the right to object, and the right to restrict processing, Segment will support the following:

  • Support for deletion requests. Deleting a customer's data from Segment can be completed with a single 'delete' command through the HTTP API.
  • Automatic data suppression. Any user associated with a delete command will automatically be placed on a data suppression list, meaning all personal data moving forward will not be tracked by Segment.

In addition, Segment's existing product capabilities support:

  • Honoring the rights to access and portability. Segment's raw data integrations and warehouses enable companies to compile a complete picture of all data sent to Segment about a user and share it with them in a structured format.
  • Rectifying user data. With just a single API call, companies can create or update a user's data inside of Segment and across a company's connected integrations, ensuring a user's data is always up to date.

About Segment
Segment is the infrastructure for your customer data. Use one API to unlock 200+ tools for every team in your company. With Segment, developers can stop building tedious and expensive one-off data integrations while business users can compute important traits about each customer and push this data to their favorite apps for analytics and personalization. Segment is trusted by thousands of companies including Gap Inc., New Relic, Instacart, Intuit, and Time. For more information visit https://segment.com.

Contact Information:

Danielle Stickler
segment@bateman-group.com