Frequently Asked Questions

Is Segment’s Consent Manager part of Consent Management?

No. Segment’s deprecated open-source Consent Manager, which captures end user cookie consent, is not part of Segment’s Consent Management product, which focuses only on enforcing end user consent. Enforcing end user consent means sharing your end users’ data with only the destinations they consented to share data with and blocking the flow of their data to all other destinations.

Segment recommends moving from the deprecated, open-source Consent Manager to one that meets your legal compliance requirements.

What destinations support consent enforcement?

All event streams destinations, with the exception of AWS S3 and Engage destinations, support consent enforcement.

Can I share current end user consent preferences with my destinations?

You can use the Destination Actions framework to share the current status of your end-users’ consent with your Actions destinations.

For more information, see the Sharing consent with Actions destinations documentation.

Why shouldn’t I use Consent Management for managing communication preferences?

Segment designed Consent Management for cookie and data collection consent use cases, not communication preferences. Segment doesn’t recommend using Consent Management for managing communication preferences, as multiple data use categories attached to one destination can block legitimate communication to your users and might limit your ability to handle user communication preferences at a more granular level.

For example, if you create 3 separate consent categories for “Product Newsletter,” “News Updates,” and “Promotional Emails” and all of these are sent through the same destination (like SendGrid,) then Consent Management only forwards data to SendGrid if the user has opted-in to all 3 categories. This behavior can block legitimate communication the user might have opted into, making it less flexible for nuanced email preference enforcement.

For managing communication preferences, Segment recommends using custom traits and then acting on these traits in Twilio Engage or a third-party tool.

Why is my event failing ingestion with the error “context.consent.categoryPreferences object is required”?

An context.consent.categoryPreferences object is required error occurs when you send the Segment Consent Preference Updated event without the context.consent.categoryPreferences object. Segment performs a validation on the Segment Consent Preference Updated event to ensure that you’ve correctly structured your end users’ consent preferences. If the required object is missing, Segment won’t ingest the event and the event won’t appear in downstream tools.

Other events, like Track, Identify, or Group, are not subject to the same consent validation and do not require the context.consent.categoryPreferences object.

If you’re using a Consent Management Platform (CMP) integration other than Segment’s Analytics.js OneTrust wrapper, you must ensure your Segment Consent Preference Updated events contain the context.consent.categoryPreferences object.

Can I use a CMP other than OneTrust to collect consent from my end users?

Yes, you can use any commercially available CMP or custom solution to collect consent from your end users. If you use a CMP other than OneTrust, you must generate your own wrapper or other mechanism to add the following objects to the events collected from your sources:

• Includes the consent object on every event
• Generates the Segment Consent Preference Updated event every time a user provides or updates their consent preferences. This event must contain their anonymousId or userId.

Segment provides guidance about creating your own wrapper in the @segment/analytics-consent-tools GitHub repository.