Worldwide, data privacy continues to take center stage. With ground-breakers like the EU’s GDPR having been in place for years, many regions continue to follow suit with their own laws and regulations. Layer this with the fact that big technology players are putting proprietary privacy bumpers in place, and that individuals themselves are more concerned than ever about what’s being done with their personal information, and you have a landscape that can be difficult to navigate for marketers and others seeking comprehensive consumer intelligence data.
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What’s happening at scale today surrounding data privacy makes it more important than ever to ensure compliance with regulations, not to mention respecting individual privacy. The power is back in the hands of the individual. In order for businesses, marketers, advertisers, researchers and more to gain access to valuable consumer data, individuals need to be the ones to proactively share it. 
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This type of zero-party data, or as described by Tim Ringel, Global CEO at Meet The People,  “information willingly or even proactively shared by consumers with the brand” is the future of consumer understanding. First and foremost, businesses need to create situations in which consumers will willingly share data directly with them. We’ve found that creating a trusted environment for consumers to share data can help us access the information that is getting harder and harder to obtain. Going above and beyond to protect users’ privacy can help - taking a “privacy by design” rather than a “privacy by compliance” approach. 
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At Measure, we have seen how this works in real life. As we build relationships with consumers in our trust-centric MSR app, there is a drastic increase in their willingness to share new forms of data and data of increasing sensitivity. For example, our community members are actively sharing account-level behavioral data, so that brands and businesses can develop trending analysis, discover leading apps and verticals, and identify (and defend against) competitive threats. This type of granular data, which shows things like weekly active usage in hours, active users (%), notifications and pickups by individual apps, amazon purchases and more, is vital to today’s consumer intelligence strategies. And it is impossible to get in today’s privacy landscape without the right trust-based approach and without the right technology solution.
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Privacy regulations promise to become more and more stringent as time goes on. Marketers, advertisers and brands require new ways to access the data they need for decision making. Trust is the essential ingredient for the future of behavioral data collection and more holistic consumer intelligence. 

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