Q: would I still be able to keep session logs of user journeys through my site without explicit consent? If not, this seems like huge issue for ecommerce analytics. If I need to obtain explicit consent, that the user isn't required to provide to continue accessing the site then I don't see how these technologies are not basically dead in the EU.
Can you even legally do a customer churn analysis under the GDPR without explicit consent?
One of the biggest complaints I have about this is that the uses for data keep growing, and legally, you can't even test a hypothesis before getting consent, which you won't be able to do frequently because users hate being asked about anything.
My intuitive response to this law is to want to split my data into EU/non-EU parts, do all my work on the non-EU parts and hope that the insights gained there can be applied to EU users.
Yes you can keep session logs, it is a 'legitimate interest'.
Are you just trying to see which deals interest people (zero issue, but you could annonymise this) or profiling the customer based on the logs and offering different prices (you are going to have to be more careful and transparent).
> Can you even legally do a customer churn analysis under the GDPR without explicit consent
There a lots of ways to look at churn with anonymised data. I do it with account ID's. If you are looking at churn rate of Asian people vs Afro-Caribbean then GDPR is going to be amongst your problems,
No, put up a “trap” page, tell the user you need to collect certain data to operate the site and make the user clicks Accept before they can use your it.
Can you even legally do a customer churn analysis under the GDPR without explicit consent?
One of the biggest complaints I have about this is that the uses for data keep growing, and legally, you can't even test a hypothesis before getting consent, which you won't be able to do frequently because users hate being asked about anything.
My intuitive response to this law is to want to split my data into EU/non-EU parts, do all my work on the non-EU parts and hope that the insights gained there can be applied to EU users.