In advance of the May 25 implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), OneTrust has released a consent management platform to help marketers comply with the regulation's strict rules on user consent.

Under the GDPR, consent is one of the six lawful bases companies have for storing and processing personal data of EU citizens.

Lisa Loftis, a principal consultant, customer intelligence, at software company SAS, previously explained to Legaltech News that to be considered valid, consent under the GDPR “has to be freely given, be specific, informed, and unambiguous, and require a clear and affirmative action.”

With the Universal Consent and Preference Management Platform, OneTrust hopes to streamline the process of collecting and validating consent through offering the ability to track, store, and change consent actions.

OneTrust CEO Kabir Barday explained that the platform is “essentially a software solution that allows a company to maintain a central database of all the consent and user preferences that they have collected from their various customers and employees.”

“It then gives those customers and employees a portal to modify their preferences, opt out, request the deletion of their data, request the access of their data and give the organization the ability to granularly track all of these things,” he said.

OneTrust's platform can connect with the various systems a company uses to collect consent by integrating with web-based portals and mobile applications, or allow users to import consent documents or data directly.

Should marketers or their companies be called upon to validate each consent action—a possibility given that the GDPR places the burden of proof on the data processor—the platform also stores what it calls “consent receipts.” Such receipts document “what that user was told at the time of consent, what they consented to, what time it happened, what the page looked like visually,” and other factors that help prove the validity of the consent, Barday said.

The Universal Consent and Preference Management is the latest of several GDPR solutions OneTrust has released in advance of the regulation. But it is also yet another GDPR-focused platform in an increasingly crowded market.

In addition to GDPR compliance and assessment tools offered by TRUSTe and PrivacyCheq, OneTrust also faces competition from GDPR apps created by law firms like Orrick, Hogan Lovells, and McCann FitzGerald. Barday, however, believes OneTrust stands out in its ability to provide an audited trail of consent actions and its ability to integrate across a wide range of data sources which collect consent.