Marketo and Employee Data Protection Regulations

[Carla_Yashiro]

I was recently denied access to Marketo to deploy an internal Newsletter at my company. Our IT Security team has concerns in regards to employee data protection regulations. Is Marketo collecting more employee data than what the data protection regulations allow? Thanks for your input! 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Depends on which exact laws -- and which exact lawyers.

Assuming the content of the newsletter itself does not reveal employee data (i.e. you're not loading anything about them into Marketo) then it probably comes down to tracking.  I've never heard of a concern about email addresses alone. (After all, any user of a SaaS app is "storing" their email address in that app. But lawyers can come up with anything, even if other lawyers would eyeroll × Infinity.)

But if you don't turn off link tracking + Munchkin for these sends, you would be sending data about the recipient's web activities to Marketo. And that would also be true of their home computers. Definitely needs to be considered.

Of course there are reasons to not  use Marketo for corporate comms, well outside of privacy concerns. To guarantee delivery you need to whitelist your emails somehow. And whitelisting is not recommended because (1) it disguises deliverability problems for your "real" Marketo emails and (2) it can allow spam or malware into your company, which is... bad.

[Carla_Yashiro]

Thank you for your response Sanford Whiteman‌! Do we know of any company that is actually leveraging Marketo for employee communications? I would absolutely benefit from picking their brains.