Why we fire after consent, and what it costs us

Every visitor-identification vendor faces the same fork. You can run your script on page load, collect what you can, and treat the consent banner as a disclosure. Or you can hold the script until the visitor says yes, and accept that most of them will not.

We took the second fork, and it costs us real coverage. It is worth being specific about the size of that cost, because vendors who take the first fork will show you bigger numbers and you should know why.

The number that goes down

Accept rates on a well-built consent banner vary enormously — by geography, by audience, by how the banner is designed. Whatever your rate is, that is our ceiling. A vendor who fires first does not have that ceiling.

So if you are comparing two proposals on identified-visitor count alone, we lose. We would rather say that here than have you find out in a bake-off.

The number that goes up

Provenance. Every record we produce carries a timestamp, a version string, a source URL and a category set, describing an affirmative act by a person on your page. When someone asks where a name came from — and in politics, someone eventually asks — that is an answer that ends the conversation.

Why the trade is not close, for a campaign

Three reasons specific to political work:

The litigation is aimed at exactly this. The California wiretapping and pen-register theories target scripts that ran before the visitor was asked. The Ninth Circuit’s holding in Javier v. Assurance IQ is that prior consent is required and retroactive consent does not cure it. A vendor firing on page load is doing the thing the cases are about.

Political data has an adversary. Commercial companies get sued. Campaigns get sued and covered. A story about a campaign secretly identifying visitors writes itself, and no amount of identified-visitor volume is worth it in the closing stretch.

The exemption you are counting on may not exist. Only Texas and Virginia expressly exempt political organizations from their state privacy laws. Colorado and New Jersey exempt no nonprofits at all. Building on the assumption that campaigns are carved out is building on a floor that varies by state.

What we will not build

We will not build a setting that fires before consent. Not for a large customer, not for a state where you believe you are exempt, not for the last two weeks of a cycle. If that is the product you need, we are not it, and there is no point in either of us pretending otherwise.