Introduction
Universal Consent allows you to collect, store, and manage all types of consent, whether it’s cookie consent, marketing email preferences, or acceptance of platform terms and conditions, to name a few examples.
The Consent Catalog is where you register the types of consents your platform will collect, store, and manage. Examples include:
- Acceptance of a website’s privacy policy.
- Acceptance of a mobile app’s terms of service.
- Consent to receive a weekly newsletter via email.
- Consent to use specific data points in an AI model.
All these consent types are versioned on the platform, allowing you to update your policies and consent-gathering strategy without impacting the consents already stored and actively in use by your business.
The Consent Log is where you can view the consents stored in the system—essentially the users' privacy preferences. Consents can be either identified or anonymous, depending on whether a User ID is included with the payload. Even for anonymous consents, a unique Consent ID is generated to group preferences by device. Here’s how they differ:
- Unidentified consents: Device-specific, no PII, and the Consent ID can be reset by the end-user at any time, detaching it from previous privacy choices.
- Identified consents: Cross-device, includes PII (User ID), and can be deleted by a CMP admin user at any time.
In all cases, the end-user always retains the ability to grant, update, or withdraw any type of consent.
The Flow
To start gathering consents, you first need to register them as types in your catalog (cookie consents are pre-built and don’t require this step). The typical flow is as follows:
- Create your consent catalog, i.e., define the types of consents your system will handle.
- Integrate your system with Universal Consent’s API to submit each consent.
- If you need to collect cookie consents, integrate the Cookie Consent Banner with your website.
Once these steps are completed, the Consent Log will begin to populate with privacy profiles and user choices.