Automatic policy enforcement
Data usage labels and policies are available to all Adobe Experience Platform users. Define data usage policies and apply data usage labels to ensure that any sensitive, identifiable, or contractual data are handled accurately. These measures help enforce your organization’s data governance rules on how data can be accessed, processed, stored, and shared.
To help safeguard your organization from potential risks and liabilities, Platform automatically enforces usage policies should any violations occur when activating audiences to destinations.
This document focuses on the enforcement of data governance and consent policies. For information on access control policies, refer to the documentation on attribute-based access control.
Prerequisites
This guide requires a working understanding of the Platform services involved in automatic enforcement. Please refer to the following documentation to learn more before continuing with this guide:
- Adobe Experience Platform Data Governance: The framework by which Platform enforces data usage compliance through the use of labels and policies.
- Real-Time Customer Profile: Provides a unified, real-time consumer profile based on aggregated data from multiple sources.
- Adobe Experience Platform Segmentation Service: The segmentation engine within Platform used to create audiences from your customer profiles based on customer behaviors and attributes.
- Destinations: Destinations are pre-built integrations with commonly used applications that allow for the seamless activation of data from Platform for cross-channel marketing campaigns, email campaigns, targeted advertising, and more.
Enforcement flow flow
The following diagram illustrates how policy enforcement is integrated into the data flow of audience activation:
When an audience is first activated, Policy Service checks for applicable policies based on the following factors:
- The data usage labels applied to fields and datasets within the audience to be activated.
- The marketing purpose of the destination.
- The profiles that have consented to be included in the audience activation, based on your configured consent policies.
- The fields are used in the audience.
- The fields are configured as projected attributes for the target destination.
Data lineage lineage
Data lineage plays a key role in how policies are enforced in Platform. In general terms, data lineage refers to the origin of a set of data, and what happens to it (or where it moves) over time.
In the context of Data Governance, lineage enables data usage labels to propagate from schemas to downstream services that consume their data, such as Real-Time Customer Profile and Destinations. This allows policies to be evaluated and enforced at several key points in the data’s journey through Platform, and provides context to data consumers as to why a policy violation occurred.
In Experience Platform, policy enforcement is concerned with the following lineage:
- Data is ingested into Platform and stored in datasets.
- Customer profiles are identified and constructed from those datasets by merging data fragments according to the merge policy.
- Groups of profiles are divided into audiences based on common attributes.
- Audiences are activated to downstream destinations.
Each stage in the above timeline represents an entity that may contribute to policy enforcement, as outlined in the table below:
Any consent attributes collected from your customers are also stored in datasets. If you have access to consent policies, any profiles that do not meet the consent attribute requirements of your policies will be excluded from audiences that are activated to a destination.
Data usage policy violations occur if you attempt to activate an audience whose usage labels are restricted for the target destination’s marketing action.
(Beta) When an audience is activated, any profiles that do not contain the required consent attributes for the marketing action (as defined by your consent policies) are excluded from the activated audience.
C1 AND C2 are both present, but does not restrict the same action if only one of those labels are present.C1 AND C2 policy is NOT enforced if these labels are included in separate audiences. Instead, this policy is only enforced when both labels are present in the same audience upon activation.When policy violations occur, the resulting messages that appear in the UI provide useful tools for exploring the violation’s contributing data lineage to help resolve the issue. More details are provided in the next section.
Policy enforcement messages enforcement
The sections below outline the different policy enforcement messages that appear in the Platform UI:
Data usage policy violation data-usage-violation
If a policy violation occurs from attempting to activate an audience (or making edits to an already activated audience) the action is prevented and a popover appears indicating that one or more policies have been violated. Once a violation has triggered, the Save button is disabled for the entity you are modifying until the appropriate components are updated to comply with data usage policies.
Select a policy name to display details for that violation.
The violation message provides a summary of the policy that was violated, including the conditions the policy is configured to check for, the specific action that triggered the violation, and a list of possible resolutions for the issue.
A data lineage graph is displayed below the violation summary, allowing you to visualize which datasets, merge policies, audiences, and destinations were involved in the policy violation. The entity that you are currently changing is highlighted in the graph, indicating which point in the flow is causing the violation to occur. You can select an entity name within the graph to open the details page for the entity in question.
You can also use the Filter icon (
Select List view to display the data lineage as a list. To switch back to the visual graph, select Path view.
Labels successfully applied labels-successfully-applied
If you create data usage policies before you label your schema fields, you may encounter a governance policy violation dialog as soon as you apply labels to your schema. In this case, you can successfully label part of your schema. The Labels successfully applied tab indicates which labels were successfully applied, as there are no policy restrictions against that field.
Use the data lineage diagram to understand what other configuration changes need to be made before you can add the label to your schema field.
Consent policy evaluation consent-policy-evaluation
When activating an audience to a destination, you can see how your consent policies affect your audience’s reach during the review stage of the Activate Destinations workflow.
Consent policy enhancement for paid media consent-policy-enhancement
An enhancement to consent policy enforcement on batch and streaming destinations including paid media activations has been made. This enhancement is available to customers of Privacy and Security Shield or Healthcare Shield, and proactively removes profiles from batch and streaming destinations as consent status changes. It also ensures that consent changes are propagated immediately so that the right audience is always targeted.
These improvements allow for greater trust in your marketing strategy as it removes the need for marketers to manually add consent attributes to their segment expression. This ensures that no profiles are inadvertently targeted for any marketing experiences once consent has been withdrawn or no longer qualified for a consent policy. The marketing consent policies that set rules for how consent or preference data should be managed across various marketing workflows are now automatically enforced in activation workflows in downstream solutions.
Pre-activation evaluation pre-activation-evaluation
Once you reach the Review step when activating a destination, select View applied policies.
A policy check dialog appears, showing you a preview of how your consent policies affect the consented audience of the audiences to be activated.
The dialog shows the consented audience for one audience at a time. To view the policy evaluation for a different audience, use the dropdown menu above the diagram to select one from the list.
Use the left rail to switch between the applicable consent policies for the selected audience. Policies that are not selected are represented in the “Other policies” section of the diagram.
The diagram displays the overlap between three groups of profiles:
- Profiles that qualify for the selected audience
- Profiles that qualify for the selected consent policy
- Profiles that qualify for the other applicable consent policies for the audience (referred to as “Other policies” in the diagram)
The profiles that qualify for all three of the above groups represent the consented audience, summarized in the right rail.
Hover over one of the audiences in the diagram to show the number of profiles it contains.
The consented audience is represented by the central overlap of the diagram, and can be highlighted like the other sections.
Flow run enforcement
When data is activated to a destination, the flow run details show the number of identities that were excluded due to active consent policies.
Policy enforcement for activated audiences policy-enforcement-for-activated-audiences
Policy enforcement still applies to audiences after they have been activated, restricting any changes to an audience or its destination that would result in a policy violation. Due to how data lineage works in policy enforcement, any of the following actions can potentially trigger a violation:
- Updating data usage labels
- Changing datasets for an audience
- Changing audience predicates
- Changing destination configurations
If any of the above actions triggers a violation, that action is prevented from being saved and a policy violation message is displayed, ensuring that your activated audiences continue to comply with data usage policies when being modified.
Next steps
This document covered how automatic policy enforcement works in Experience Platform. For steps on how to programmatically integrate policy enforcement into your applications using API calls, see the guide on API-based enforcement.