The Consent & Preferences Landscape in 2025
A rural lifestyle retailer hit with a significant fine for not honoring opt-out preference signals. Do Not Sell requests that weren't being processed. A UI that didn't match what was actually being executed on the backend. Clothing retailers. Large automotive companies. The enforcement actions keep coming, and they're all pointing to the same problem.
The notable pattern: none of these are strictly a vendor problem or a gap in software. The consent platform itself isn't the differentiator. All of these fines were implementation issues. They came down to a lack of governance and a lack of understanding about what was being deployed and what was actually being set.
The Gap Between What You Say and What You Do
We see this constantly across the organizations we work with. There's a lack of collaboration between the legal team making UI decisions and the technical reality of what can actually be executed. Legal drafts language for the banner. Marketing has requirements for tracking. Engineering implements what they understand. Nobody owns the ongoing verification that these pieces actually align.
The enforcement pattern is consistent: regulators are targeting the disconnect between consumer-facing promises and backend behavior. If your deletion request process isn't actually deleting all the data you have on someone, that's a problem. And honestly, for probably half of the organizations out there, that process isn't fully comprehensive. It's really hard to do when you start thinking about system logs, or if you're in a regulated industry where you need to keep records.
The key is being very clear about what's actually going to happen. That intent and transparency about what you can do for someone is becoming more and more important.
Compliance Drift Is the Real Risk
Most clients we talk to sit in a place where they had big deployments in 2019 - 2021 and then they've been relatively ungoverned and unchanged for a number of years now.
What happens is each year, as new states have come on with new regulations and new requirements, these organizations have gotten farther and farther away from the compliance level they had when they initially implemented. This isn't a set-it-and-forget-it project. Once you start a consent management program, it's a program that's going to need active care, maintenance, and attention to stay up to date.
California is no longer the most restrictive state for everything. When you're designing United States programs now, it's easiest to manage long-term if you create a program you're going to apply nationally, not try to manage things state by state. That means developing new features that weren't on your 2019 roadmap: listing out which third parties receive personal information, providing opt-out of profiling options that specifically weren't called out in California. These requirements change what should happen on the backend when you read a GPC signal.
The Regulators Are Getting Organized
If you take a look at the recent enforcement actions around Consent & Preferences over 2025, they all call out similar issues.
Excessive verification to exercise privacy rights
CMP improperly configured leading to asymmetrical choices and failure to process within required timeframe
A convoluted privacy rights request process for organizations that leads to rights not being able to be processed at all in some cases
Vendor contracts being insufficient when it comes to explaining what data is shared with third-parties and for what purpose
Job applicant privacy not being honored regarding privacy notices provided to applicants (this one is relatively new - was called out for the first time in the CPPA’s most recent enforcement action)
This is a clear playbook that organizations can follow when auditing their own Consent & Preferences program. If a regulator was to take a look at your processes for each of the points listed above, how many would your organization pass?
What a Sustainable Program Actually Requires
Your consent infrastructure really works if it's API-based. There are antiquated tools on the market, and there are builds we've worked with that are file transfer-based and time-based. The reality is this causes a ton of headache. When you're trying to orchestrate across different systems and you've got nightly file pickups, this is where we see errors happen. Customers end up with different settings in different buckets. Even if it's just for a certain time period before those file transfers sync, the experience implications are rough.
The core requirements for a sustainable program:
API-first architecture that enables real-time synchronization across systems
Business unit mandatory participation with company-wide mandate to use the same structure
Full marketing and operational stack integration covering communications, order fulfillment, and appointment reminders
Consumer-facing preference management that's accessible and actionable
Ongoing governance to catch drift before regulators do
Business unit participation deserves particular emphasis. If there's not a mandate that company-wide, all business units need to collaborate and use the same structure, you're just siloing and pushing the data out. Allowing different business units to run their own consent programs, their own SMS consent, drives a disparate consumer experience and makes it really challenging to get an effective governance layer.
Consumer Expectations Are Part of This Equation
Customers are now more willing than ever before to walk away from a brand over lost trust or even a poor customer experience. People are willing to go with a brand they trust, but at the same time they want the same personalized experiences that the brands collecting all their data are delivering.
The shift has to go from listening to customers without them knowing we're listening, to actually asking them what they want.
- Do you want us to listen to you directly?
- Do you want to select what products and categories you'd like to see?
- Are you okay with us watching your behavior?
Put everything in a value exchange proposition. Make sure the customer understands why you want the data, what it's limited to, and how you're using it.
The most successful programs keep pushing toward soliciting more first-party and zero-party data directly from customers, getting away from relying so much on tracking technologies. Every time you ask a customer for something, you actually execute on it. You change your behavior based on what they want. You develop a relationship of trust and transparency with the data you're getting from them.
The Bottom Line
Compliance is only half the story. The business opportunity in a well-architected consent program is substantial. Organizations that give customers meaningful choices, rather than just binary opt-in or opt-out, see dramatically better retention. One client of ours added a simple frequency toggle to their preference center, letting customers choose weekly emails instead of daily, and saw over an 80% reduction in customers opting out entirely. That's not a privacy win. That's a marketing win.
The shift from third-party tracking to first-party and zero-party data collection isn't just a regulatory response. It's a better way to understand customers. When you ask customers what they want and then actually deliver on it, you build the kind of trust that translates to customer lifetime value. Privacy teams have a real impact on marketing bottom lines when the program is designed to create value, not just avoid fines.
The question isn't whether your consent program needs attention. It's whether you'll treat it as a compliance checkbox or as infrastructure for building customer trust.
Need to assess where your consent program has drifted? Register for our webinar with VaultJS on December 11 at 11 AM EST, where we’ll explore different case studies on C&P implementations and what’s worked for organizations.
Click the link here to save your spot today.