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This article addresses how beauty businesses should deal with consumer data privacy and what steps to take to protect your customers' privacy –particularly in beauty-tech, where sensitive personal data is often at stake.
Brands that don't safeguard their customers' personal information and privacy risk breaking the law and facing legal, reputational, and financial penalties. Recent cases of high-profile corporations abusing consumer data continue to raise concerns over how beauty brands and retailers collect consumer data and ensure customer privacy.
Especially in beauty tech, this becomes a delicate issue. AI/AR-enabled applications require detailed information about consumers' skin, personal concerns, and even their selfies, which raises many questions for consumers. Therefore, transparency and customer trust should be a focal point at each step of the customer journey.
The above also begets a brand's onus to select the right beauty technology partner that places great value on honesty and clarity and is committed to safeguarding and respecting your customers' privacy.
Here are three ways you can protect your customer's privacy in a beauty-tech world:
Ensure Privacy and Security are Embedded Across Your Tech Partners' Offering
When using AI/AR-powered solutions, customers submit their data to you or your tech partners at every stage of the experience. Your customers' data is sensitive, as it often relates to their biometrics.
Data protection laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): “Sensitive personal data is protected by the GDPR, which prohibits the storage of such data unless a user has given prior consent." In other words, your beauty-tech partner should comply with all GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and biometric acts regulations.
This is why understanding the importance of data trust issues, and customer privacy is among Revieve's most critical priorities. We operate a secure, enterprise-grade CCPA, HIPAA, and GDPR-compliant infrastructure for data transmission to ensure the highest protection and privacy passing through Revieve's systems.
Find Out Whether Customer Consent and Transparency are a Default in Parts of the Customer Journey Where Data Processing is Involved
Brands and retailers collecting sensitive data also need to keep users aware of all potential risks - and the level of consent obtained when a user submits their sensitive data - and that such consent can be withdrawn at any time by the users.
A fundamental requirement today is to always asking for consent whenever your customers share personal information. However, when dealing with technology partners, you mustn't be the only one dealing with all the data privacy responsibility.
Your beauty-tech partner should now have consent added to all their offerings. Data breaches can damage your brand reputation and erode consumer trust and confidence. That's why at Revieve, we always ensure our partners are safeguarded during the implementation of our experiences by having the consent added to all our solutions, whether it's a VTO or AI Skincare Advisor.
Moreover, you should be transparent and specifically mention how the user's data will be processed. For instance, in Revieve powered-by solutions, the consumer goes through the experience as an anonymous user. None of the data can be linked to an individual without opt-in from the consumer. If a beauty business allows the user to opt-in and integrate the data through "send to my email" or "save to my account," the user then needs to opt-in to give data, and brand/retailer terms & conditions are presented for storing the data.
Make Certain Your Tech Partner Prevents the Storage of Your Customer Data
In all the stages of the customer journey, ensuring all data, privacy, and security concerns are taken care of is highly important for any beauty company. A baseline understanding of how the data is collected is the most critical step for any brand or retailer looking to implement an AI/AR-powered beauty experience or select a beauty technology partner to work with.
Your beauty technology partner should not form a record of your customer's personal information, including emails, names, phone numbers, etc. For example, at Revieve, we don't receive access to nor are provided access to any personally identifiable information about its users from our beauty brand and retail partners.
The information exchanged between brands, and Revieve is limited to information about the relevant skincare and beauty products sold by brands to its end consumers.
When working with Revieve, you own all data. We only use anonymized aggregated data for analytics to help you optimize the experience during your quarterly reviews. Moreover, all selfies taken with our experiences are only analyzed, transformed into data points, and deleted permanently after the user session; in other words, they are not temporarily stored.
Beyond this, we place great value on honesty and clarity and are committed to building a strong and lasting relationship with you based on trust and mutual benefit. Part of this commitment means safeguarding and respecting your privacy and your choices..
If you're curious to learn more about how we protect your customers’ privacy and safeguard your customers personal information when implementing beauty tech solutions, contact us today.
