What Global Privacy Control Means for Retail Teams Heading Into Peak Season

Black Friday and Cyber Monday result in higher website traffic for retailers than any other week of the year. This is also when falling short of the many privacy laws now in place costs the most. An increasing number of states now mandate that websites automatically respect a shopper's privacy preferences, without the need for clicking on a cookie banner. The technologies required to comply are the same ones that support ad targeting and attribution, highlighting that this is a marketing issue before a legal challenge.

Global Privacy Control (GPC) is a browser setting a shopper turns on once. From then on, their browser automatically tells every site they visit not to sell or share their personal information. Twelve states now require businesses to recognize and honor it. A shopper with GPC enabled might see the consent banner load with tracking already switched off, or might not see it at all, because the choice was made before the website was opened. California added a step this year, requiring businesses to visually display that it processed the signal as a valid opt-out request. The page loads, the banner behaves normally, and nobody learns the signal is being ignored until someone tests it, often after the traffic spike has already passed. For retailers, that’s a direct hit to ad performance during a crucial week of the year. Nearly half of consumers (48 percent) now click "accept all" less often than they did three years ago, and over half manage their cookie preferences selectively, with 39 percent accepting only necessary cookies. The signals feeding attribution and audience data are already thinning without any help from regulators. GPC is that same shift arriving as a legal requirement rather than a slow decline in click rates.

GPC compliance often falls through the cracks between two teams, each believing the other is responsible. Legal references the privacy policy that acknowledges opt-out signals, while marketing points to the cookie banner that addresses other privacy choices. Both are accurate, but neither explain how the pixels and analytics tags react to the signals, leaving the responsibility for proper response spread across legal, marketing, and engineering teams without clear ownership.

Ignoring the signal now creates legal exposure. Plaintiffs' firms are using the California Invasion of Privacy Act, a 1967 wiretapping law, to go after cookies, pixels and third-party analytics tools, often with a federal wiretapping claim attached. Florida and Pennsylvania plaintiffs are running the same playbook under their own state laws. Most cases never reach a courtroom, as a demand letter typically requests $15,000 to $40,000, making settlement less expensive than litigation. With 24 state privacy laws in place and no federal statute unifying them, a retailer selling nationwide has to meet the strictest state’s requirements rather than the average. Fixing this means deciding which tags stop firing when the signal arrives, and that decision often gets made without marketing in the room. Block too broadly and the site ends up compliant and collecting less than it's entitled to. The problem surfaces weeks later, when November numbers don't add up.

There's still time to get ahead of Black Friday. California’s Opt Me Out Act mandates that every web browser must be able to send an opt-out preference signal by Jan. 1, 2027, meaning that more visitors will arrive with this feature activated starting next season. Retailers that manage this effectively view it as a single inquiry with a designated owner. Check the function of the tags upon receiving the GPC signal, marketing ensures that there are no unnecessary blocks, and the response is documented before the busy season.

Maureen Prado Roberts is vice president, commercial U.S. at Usercentrics, a data privacy technology company.