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Consent Management

Managing user consent is critical for legal compliance and user privacy. WalkerOS follows a privacy-by-design approach and offers multiple ways to handle consent and manage data processing to ensure the user's privacy is respected.

warning

This guide can be seen as an inspiration. It is not a legal advice. Make sure to consult with a legal expert to ensure that your implementation is compliant with the laws and regulations that apply to your business.

Command​

Typically, a Consent Management Platform (CMP) handles the consent. This is an asynchronous process. The CMP has to load, a user has to make a choice, and/or the state has to be updated.

To set/update the consent state, the CMP should actively push the consent command with a group or an individual tool's permission state (true/false). If only one condition applies, consent is granted. Updating only one value won't override existing states.

elb('walker consent', { functional: true, marketing: false });

Consent keys can be defined arbitrarily (typically known as functional, analytics, and marketing). However, you can also use individual names for each vendor.

The walker handles the race conditions: Previously pushed events get processed in the correct order after granting the consent state with the destinations as well as new ones.

To start walker.js only after a consent choice, use the on consent command:

// Wait for functional consent to run
elb('walker on', 'consent', {
  functional: () => {
    elb('walker run');
  },
});

// Later, a CMP has to update the consent state
elb('walker consent', { functional: true });

Another example of how to use the on consent command might be to update Googles consent mode v2:

elb('walker on', 'consent', (instance, consent) => {
  // Check if marketing consent is granted
  if (consent.marketing) {
    gtag('consent', 'update', {
      ad_user_data: 'granted',
      ad_personalization: 'granted',
      ad_storage: 'granted',
      analytics_storage: 'granted',
    });
  }
});

The consent mode will be updated via gtag as soon as marketing consent is granted.

Destinations​

With each event, the consent states get checked. Every event will be added to an ordered queue if consent isn't granted yet and the destination's queue isn't disabled. The queue resets with each walker run command. And will be (re-)processed with each walker consent update. The key must match the key used in each destination.config.consent.

info

The queued events properties consent, globals, and user will be updated to the current state before being processed.

info

A destination only requires one granted consent state to process events.

To revoke consent and stop sharing events with a destination, all matching rules have to be set to false:

elb('walker consent', { marketing: false });

A CMP is a tool that helps to collect and manage user consent. It is responsible for displaying a consent banner, collecting user consent, and managing the consent state.

The CMP also tells the walker.js about the consent choice by actively pushing it via the walker consent command.

Here are example implementations for some popular CMPs: