Data sovereignty vs personalization – drawing the line with informed, user-led marketing

We all want to be able to deliver meaningful, personalized experiences to our customers, but doing this while also respecting their privacy and maintaining your data sovereignty is becoming increasingly challenging.

There’s the technical aspect – using tools where you own the data and control where that data lives – but there’s also the ethical aspect. Firstly, how much data do we capture about our customers, and why? Secondly, how much of their data do we pass across to third parties that we don’t control, so they can help us to deliver a more personalized experience?

The question shouldn’t be whether we should personalize, as much of the research shows that it leads to a better experience for customers. The question we need to be asking, as responsible marketers, is how we can collect and use information about our customers in a way that genuinely serves our customers’ interests, rather than just our commercial interests, and while ensuring that every step of the way we’re respecting their privacy.

Understanding data sovereignty in marketing

Data sovereignty refers to the concept that data is subject to the laws and governance structures of the jurisdiction where it is collected, stored, and processed – and crucially, who has ultimate control over that data. For marketing professionals, this creates two distinct but related challenges.

Business-level data sovereignty

This is about where your marketing automation platform operates, who controls the infrastructure, and which legal jurisdiction governs your data processing. When you use an EU-hosted SaaS platform, for example, your customer data may be subject to EU laws regardless of where your customers are located. That might be totally fine for you, but problematic if that country’s laws are in conflict with your own values, or that of your customers.

Customer-level data agency

This is about giving your customers meaningful control over their personal information – how it’s collected, used, and shared within your marketing systems. While related to data sovereignty, this is more accurately described as data agency or user empowerment.

The distinction matters, because you can have strong customer privacy practices while still operating in a data sovereignty model that doesn’t serve your business interests – or vice versa. True digital independence requires addressing both levels.

Why this matters for marketing professionals

Consider the practical implications: if you’re using a major cloud-based marketing platform, your customer data may be:

• Subject to foreign government access requests
• Processed in data centres outside your jurisdiction

• Controlled by, and/or accessed by, a third-party company whose interests may not align with yours or your customers’

This is where platforms like Mautic provide genuine advantages – self-hosted, open source solutions give you actual control over both the infrastructure and the data processing.

However, achieving infrastructure sovereignty is only the foundation. Once you have control over where and how your marketing data is processed, the next challenge becomes how you collect and use that data ethically. 

For marketing professionals, this means acknowledging that the data we use to personalize experiences doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the individuals who generated it, and they have trusted us to take care of that data when it’s in our custody. Our role, therefore, is to be responsible stewards of that data, using it in ways that create genuine value for the people who have entrusted it to us.

With most people experiencing varying degrees of information overload and severely limited attention spans nowadays, we also have to ensure that when we’re asking for consent, the individual is actually able to understand what we’re asking and consent accordingly, instead of clicking whichever button gets the popup out of the way quickest.

This is where the distinction between different types of customer data becomes crucial – and where zero-party and first-party data offer the greatest opportunities for building truly sovereign data relationships, because we are in control of how, when and why we ask for consent and capture information.

Read more about the four types of marketing data in our blog post: Understanding the four types of marketing data: A beginner’s guide.

The challenge of personalization – value vs intrusion

The challenge with personalization involves walking a tightrope, because the more effectively we want to personalize, the more data we typically need to collect and process, yet increased data collection often correlates with decreased user trust and increased privacy concerns.

So, how do we keep our balance as we walk this tightrope?

Four critical questions every marketer should be asking

A simple test you might consider asking yourself before you consider using customer data in your personalization efforts:

• Would a reasonable person expect this use of their data in this context?
  
  • Using purchase history to recommend similar products based on buying behaviour modelling might be acceptable, however inferring health status or specific conditions and then marketing that to the user based on that assumption may feel more intrusive
    
• Is the outcome clearly beneficial to them (not just to us)?
  
  • Showing localized recommendations when a user provides their location which are relevant to the user’s interests can help them to find things they’re interested in, however showing third party revenue-generating advertisements targeted to their geographic region will probably feel more uncomfortable than beneficial to the user
    
• Can they easily opt out, opt down, or change preferences at any time?

  
  • A granular consent preference centre where users can control the kind of information they receive and how their information is used (for example opting out of personalization all together), rather than an ‘all or nothing’ unsubscribe, or a preference centre that only allows you to turn on or off marketing communications without any customization, means the user feels more in control of their digital experience with your brand
    
• Are we collecting the minimum necessary data – and only when it becomes relevant?
  
  • As trust builds, providing users with reasons to share more with you to deliver more useful information and provide a better service is a much more natural way of developing your dataset for a customer, rather than asking for everything upfront ‘on the first date’. Data should also be removed when it’s no longer relevant to retain it.

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no,’ you’re likely crossing the ethical line, and in many jurisdictions, the legal one too
McKinsey’s research on consumer data protection reveals that personalized advertising and marketing represent significant global value in digital ecosystems (McKinsey, 2020¹), however this value is only sustainable when it’s built on a foundation of trust and genuine user benefit.

Finding your own approach

Sadly there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to the level of personalization that will be appropriate, as every customer base and audience will have different levels of tolerance and expectations for both providing the data necessary and receiving a tailored experience based on their data.

In our next post we’ll be sharing some tips on how to create an ethical strategy for using personalisation in your marketing campaigns. In the meantime, leave a comment and share how you’ve got started with personalization and what you’ve found to be the most impactful way of personalization with your customers?

1. McKinsey & Company (2020) ‘Consumer data protection and privacy’, McKinsey, 27 April. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/the-consumer-data-opportunity-and-the-privacy-imperative (Accessed: 18 August 2025). ↩︎