Regulators are scrutinising whether website and email users’ data consent choices are valued, and many firms are failing core privacy tests.
TL;DR: conduct independent tests of your consent banners.
According to one privacy benchmark report, heavily-visited US websites fail to respect the choices that their visitors make.
DataTrue tested 242 high-traffic sites covering retail, healthcare, banking, higher education and media. Every once was loaded three different ways: with no consent choice, with the Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signal enabled, and after clicking the site’s reject button where one existed. Suspected missing out-outs were checked by hand.
- 104 of the sites failed core privacy tests.
- Among the 173 sites loading and tracking, 80% offered no obvious opt-out.
- 76% did not fully honour GPC.
- Of 24 sites with a clear reject button, 20 still sent data to advertising companies after the visitor clicked it.
This indicates an underlying problem among marketing sites with analytics, retargeting and email-tracking scripts: tags fire regardless of a user’s consent settings.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Fund websites carry similar stacks – analytics, LinkedIn and Google pixels, CRM tracking and email-click redirects – and investor audiences in the EU, UK, and California are covered by consent regimes.
Regulators have increasingly scrutinised if a consent banner’s “reject” option actually stops tracking, where a banner that looks compliant but does not work is worse than not having one at all. In light of this, fund marketers need to take a practical route to assess if their website and email platform’s consent requirements are up to scratch:
- Have someone test your site in a browser with GPC enabled and the network tab open, click “reject”, and see what still fires.
- Document every tag and pixel, including those added by agencies or event microsites.
- Confirm if your email platform’s click and open tracking is covered by your privacy notice and consent basis.
- Build engagement reporting around clicks, replies and meeting rather than unreliable open tracking affected by mail privacy features.
- Loop in legal and compliance teams, with marketing data practices as important as any other regulation that applies to protecting institutional investors’ sensitive information.
Source
DataTrue, “The Consent Gap: US Website Tracking Benchmark 2026”
