JENTIS Essential Mode

JENTIS Essential Mode is the superpower in your data privacy and quality endeavors. It allows you to collect the most precise data, while at the same time respecting privacy and protecting the data of your website visitors. In this article, we will explain the concept of Essential Mode, give you the technical descriptions to configure it for your website, and how to raise awareness for this topic in your organization.

What is JENTIS Essential Mode?

JENTIS Essential Mode is a feature that enables website owners to define what type of data to collect according to the users' consent status.

When consent is given, the access and storage of data on the user’s device are enabled after the consent is received. However, if users actively don’t give consent or simply don’t interact with your consent banner, all the data will be lost—in some cases, this could mean up to 70% of data lost.

To solve this, JENTIS Essential Mode allows website owners to configure a fallback to maintain data quality in cases where no consent is given. This is possible by allowing website owners to configure their tracking within the limitations of accessing and storing data on users' devices under the “strictly necessary” exception in the ePrivacy Directive.

This means that JENTIS customers can define, within their Data Protection guidance, what is considered “strictly necessary” data for their business and configure its tracking for cases where consent is not given. This data can then be modified before being shared with third-party tools.

In summary, with JENTIS Essential Mode, you can:

Have up to 100% of your website’s data collected with fully compliant methods.
Make better data-driven marketing and business decisions with a complete view of your users' journeys.
Recover information you’d have previously lost due to no consent. No more blind spots on your data.

Data Persistence and Identifier Basics in JENTIS

In general, this is how Essential Mode works:

JENTIS steps in as a privacy-enhancing measure with your website. These privacy-enhancing elements enable Customers and their data protection teams to configure “strictly necessary” access and storage to comply with the consent exception rules under Art. 5 para. 3 sentence 2 ePrivacy Directive (also see § 25 (2) TTDSG):

Time of data storage: To increase page speed, JENTIS Essential Mode allows for a synchronous load of the JENTIS Tag Manager and the Consent Management Platform (CMP) of the customer’s choice. By default, the reading of information & storage in the JENTIS systems is activated after the website visitor interaction with the consent banner.
Content of the information: When the Essential Mode is activated by default, some data parameters are minimized and modified. For example, JENTIS does not store the user's IP Address and shares only the JENTIS Server IP Address in communication with third parties.
Duration of information storage: Data storage in the Essential Mode is limited to a maximum of 13 months by default. This can also be set individually by the customer.
Information readability: JENTIS will use a first-party cookie to identify signals, but it will not share any sensitive data if configured correctly and accordingly with Essential Mode.

Now, let’s see how JENTIS Essential Mode can be configured in the next steps below:

Essential Mode Setup

There are three steps in the configuration of the Essential Mode in JENTIS:

The foundation is the definition of what variables (parameter values) are PII (personally identifiable information). These variables will be automatically converted into wrapped “Anonymization” functions in all tags where Essential Mode applies.
The next step is to activate the Essential Mode for individual tools and their vendors in the JENTIS Tag Manager.
Last but not least, you can customize the settings of the Essential Mode in each tag individually.

1. PII Definition

This step is optional, but it can be convenient to first set this setting per variable (and the later tags will automatically set the right configuration by default).

Every single data point in JENTIS Tag Manager has a toggle switch to set the foundation on the most detailed level: per variable.

If a variable is considered to handle PII data you must set this to “true”.

Please apply this to all variables to make sure every use case is covered.

2. Activate Essential Mode

To activate the Essential Mode per tool, you have to navigate to the "Legal Hub" section in the main menu. Select the list of vendors and, for each tools vendor, you can define the consent setting as applicable:

The options you have are:

Consent Mode: tools related to this vendor will activate only when consent from the user is received.
Essential Mode: you have the option to apply a split configuration in each tag of this vendor's tools. A version for when consent is given and a different version when consent is denied.
No Consent Mode: this tool will activate straight away without considering the consent.

3. Customize Tags in Essential Mode Settings

When you select Consent Enabled (Essential Mode) for a vendor in the previous step, the tools within that vendor will show on the tag editor view a second column in the parameter definition:

Now that the JENTIS Essential Mode is active for your tool, you can customize those settings per each parameter in all tags of this tool. You can customize those settings individually per each parameter. The default will anonymize all variables that are marked as PII in all tags.

In Essential Mode, you can select the parameters' values to be different, i.e., apply a function to fully anonymize the variable value or pseudonymize it (it will remain the same for a single user).

Next Steps

Now that we have the basics covered, how about discussing the actual configuration to customize what data is sent at what event? Talking about Essential Mode Data Stream Options.