Segment Launches Privacy Portal and Functions Solutions

Segment, a customer data infrastructure company, today launched Segment Privacy Portal, giving businesses more control and visibility of the first-party customer data they are collecting; and Functions, which allows Segment users to create new, custom data integrations in minutes.

Segment's Privacy Portal aids companies in proactive privacy management, creating a real-time data inventory that automatically detects customer data and allows companies to classify it in line with internal policies. With all first-party customer data flowing through Segmen's Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI), businesses can control how data is collected, managed, and used. They can also set rules governing the data points they want to automatically restrict or prevent from being collected in the first place. Whenever a restricted data point is detected, the Privacy Portal immediately alerts the business and blocks it from passing through.

"The privacy-personalization paradox is a false dichotomy" said Segment's CEO and co-founder, Peter Reinhardt, in a statement. "Privacy is not a zero-sum game, traded off against growth or the quality of the customer experiences. With the Privacy Portal, companies have the tools they need to respect privacy and mitigate risk, without sacrificing the customer-first experiences that continue to drive their business forward"

"Segment's Privacy Portal gives us the confidence to align our event data streams with our company's data privacy and governance standards," said Rudy Martin, chief information security officer at Trustpilot, a customer review platform provider, in a statement. "With real-time visibility across our event streams, we are able to proactively respect our customers' privacy."

Functions, meanwhile, lets companies connect their first-party customer data to other marketing, business, or analytics tools. With just a few lines of code, companies can integrate first-party customer data with any homegrown tool or external service, beyond the more than 300 out-of-the-box sources and destinations in the Segment catalog. They can also customize existing integrations to fit their specific needs.

"In today's marketplace, businesses who want to create compelling customer experiences now have thousands of amazing tools at their disposal. But reliably integrating many of them with the rest of the data stack has, until now, been a major technical challenge that can take weeks of engineering time," said Calvin French-Owen, Segment's co-founder and chief technology officer, in a statement. "Segment Functions solves this issue with complete flexibility and lets companies go from having the spark of an idea to a fully built-out workflow in just a few minutes."

"As our company grows, we need to empower our marketing and sales partners while staying focused on our mission of saving our users money on their everyday purchases. Segment saves us valuable time by removing the need to build and maintain complex data integrations," said Shaun Dubuque, vice president of engineering at RetailMeNot, in a statement. "With Functions, Segment has given us the flexibility to redesign our marketing stack with minimal impact to our engineering team, unlocking combinations between the tech we've developed in-house and new, best-in-class tools we want to add to our arsenal in the future."