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:

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:

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:

Each stage in the above timeline represents an entity that may contribute to policy enforcement, as outlined in the table below:

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 ( ) to filter the displayed entities by category. At least two categories must be selected in order for data to be displayed.

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 different percentages of profiles included in the activation.

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

Once you reach at 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 activated audiences.

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:

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:

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.