Since 1 June 2022, Thailand has finally enforced its PDPA law causing a wave of concerns among its businesses. In this article, Convert Digital will outline just what is PDPA and how business may start adapting to a cookieless world to continue optimizing and retargeting its customers while keeping their privacy in check.
What Is PDPA?
PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act) is basically a Thai adaptation of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The law is meant to keep information misuses in check and also states that any use of personal information from any business will need a proper consent otherwise they may not be used lawfully.
What Is Personal Information?
Businesses keep their customer data in many forms which may include a lot of personal and sensitive information. Once the PDPA law is enforced, companies must comply with it by verifying their existing database of data and request consent from people within its file before using them.
Personal data includes but may not limited to the below:
- Name and surname
- Phone number, email, address
- Date of birth, weight and height
- ID number, passport number, driver license
- Education, financial or medical information
- Car registration number, land or house registration
- Any other information that may be identifiable such as Username/Password, Cookies, IP address, GPS location and more
Also, companies must be especially careful around these ‘sensitive information’ below:
- Ethnicity and race
- Political opinions
- Religious and beliefs
- Sexuality
- Criminal record
- Worker union information
- Medical information such as disabilities, vaccination record, doctor’s certificate and more
- Genetic information such as face, retina information, fingerprint information and more
How PDPA Has Changed Digital Marketing?
As you may know, asking customers in your company database the permission to use their data will not go very well. You may not get any consent at all, which is perfectly normal. In that case, we recommend you start devising a way to collect ‘First Party Data’ to avoid losing the edge in targeting potential customers.
Previously, most online advertising and website analytics tools are utilizing ‘Cookies’ which tagged each person with a unique ID and stored their information. Later each platform will be able to anonymously identify each customer correctly, which leads to correct purchase data attribution, precise retargeting and more.
Now with PDPA, if the customer does not give consent on your cookie bar, you have the risk of not getting any information at all and your analytics tool will NOT work. This unfortunately leads to a harder job for marketers to cope with the change to keep their marketing game precise and measurable.
Prepare Your Business For A World Of Consent
We know information is gold. Businesses need to state on their website what data will be collected, how they will be used and where to read the full privacy policy. Also, it needs good security to keep all this data in check. But that’s just to comply with the law.
To make use of today’s advanced advertising platforms, which fortunately developed for a cookieless world, businesses should also start collecting ‘First Party Data’ which means building a real customer list from various sources with consent checked. This will bypass the use of cookies and require a bit more work to do, but you have almost no choice because in a few years, everything online will be very much anonymous.
Steps to Adapt:
- Have your ‘Privacy Policy’ page with clear details on the website
- Inform all of your customers to give consent by email, cookie banner, etc.
- Adapt the use of website cookie banners to collect crucial information we used to collect. If the customer refuses, your analytics tool may not be working at all.
- In case of information leakage, have a plan to notify your customers.
- Plan to collect first party data in place of using cookies. Think creatively to scrape relevant customer data such as name, email, phone and more but always ask for consent when you collect.
There is still much to do to ensure your business thrive and win under this new rule. If you are concerned about the future of your marketing actions, consult us for free and we will show you the way.
