Configuring the Privacy Center
The Privacy Center is the front-facing portal that connects your users to their data rights. Despite being built and wired-up by Transcend, the Privacy Center is designed to seamlessly integrate into the look and feel of your company's existing website, and is typically even hosted directly at privacy.your-company.com.
Once configured on your end, your companies data practices will be organized into an easy-to-understand format for your users. A side-menu navigation pane makes it easy for data subjects to explore your company's data practices and policies without being overwhelmed. It serves as a visualization of the data your company collects, how that data is used, and with whom it is shared.
Through the "Make a Privacy Request" tab, data subjects are able to submit the types of DSRs your organization supports through an intuitive interface.
Your company's Privacy Center can be configured from the Privacy Center tab → of the same Admin Dashboard interface that your company uses to view and manage requests (see Review and Approval. The steps for updating and deploying your company's custom Privacy Center can be broken into three steps:
The structure of your company's data is determined by The Integrations and can be updated directly from the Admin Dashboard. This structure determines everything from how the side menu of your Privacy Center looks to how the bundle of data in a Data Subject Access Request presents itself. Since data regulations treat data differently based on how its collected and used, configuring your Integrations correctly is about more than the aesthetics.
The "Data Practices" tab on the left side menu has three panels that allow you to add Data Collections to your Integrations. On creation, Data Collections should be given a method based on how such data was collected by your company.
| Data Collection Method | Description |
|---|---|
Info we track | Information that your company tracks about your users (e.g. analytics data from cookies). |
Info you give us | Information that your customers give you (e.g. information from forms they fill out). |
Info shared by others | Information that other vendors have shared with your company about your customers. |
If for some reason you wish to remove this interface, you can do so on the General Settings section of the Privacy Center settings. Simply toggle on the setting "Hide data practices page"
The bottom three panes on the Admin Dashboard's Privacy Center configuration let you customize your Privacy Center's look and feel.
| Asset name | What it controls | Recommendations | File type extension | Location in diagram |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Logo | Your company logo, shown on the header nav bar in mobile views | Not white (header bar is white) | .png (.svg will render on the website, but not on certain communications such as Gmail) | A1 |
Favicon | The shortcut icon to display on browser tabs | 1:1 aspect ratio | .png, .svg, .ico | A2 |
Logo on Side Menu | Your company logo, rendered on your primary color or side menu color, defaults to Logo | Different colored version if needed (i.e., black or white) | .png, .svg | A3 |
Hero Image | The main image displayed on the header of every page. | 3:2 aspect ratio, transparent background if you want the Hero background color to show through to prevent hard edge cut-offs | .png, .svg | A4 |
Sidebar Widget Background | The optional background image for the desktop view's sidebar widget | Image height between 400-600px in portrait orientation to allow ample space for text and button contents | .png, .svg | C13 |
| Color name | What it controls | Location in diagram |
|---|---|---|
Primary | The primary color, used ubiquitously to color miscellaneous logos, borders, buttons, etc. | C1 |
Text on Primary | The color of text that is on top of the Primary color | C2 |
Secondary | The secondary color, often black or dark gray, that is used to complement the Primary color | C3 |
Text on about Transcend widget | The color of text that sits on top of the Transcend widget. | C4 |
Main paragraph text | The text color of paragraphs in your policy text | C5 |
Lighten text | The color for lighter text subtitles. | C6 |
Background accent | An accent color that complements the background. Defaults to Primary | C7 |
Error | The color for error messages. | C8 |
Side menu background | The background color of the Privacy Center side menu. Defaults to Primary | C9 |
Text on side menu | The color of text on the Privacy Center side menu. Defaults to Primary. | C10 |
Hero background | The background color to the hero. Defaults to Primary | C11 |
Text on hero | The color for the text on the Hero Image. Defaults to Text on Primary | C12 |
About Transcend widget background | The background color of the about Transcend widget. Defaults to Secondary | C13 |
Highlighted text | The color of text highlighting for paragraphs on the Privacy Center. Defaults to Primary | C14 |
| Description Name | What it controls | Location in diagram |
|---|---|---|
Hero title | The main call to introductory message on the page header. | D1 |
Hero description | Below the title, some description text. | D2 |
CTA button description | The description text in the Make a Privacy Request CTA button, describing the privacy actions that the data subject can make. | D3 |
Meta title | The meta HTML title, displayed on an open tab, and used by search engines for indexing purposes. | D4 |
Meta description | The meta HTML description, used by search engines for indexing purposes. | D5 |
You may also customize the look and feel of your Privacy Center using CSS. This includes applying custom CSS to your headers, buttons, body text, and hero image. These changes can be made under the Custom CSS Styles section of the Privacy Center → Colors & Styles page.
When you first start with Transcend, your Privacy Center will be initially hosted at a Transcend-owned subdomain your-company.trsnd.co. While here, this Privacy Center looks and acts exactly as it would once you launch it on your own domain, so you can customize and test the page to your liking.
When you are satisfied with the changes made to your Privacy Center, you can launch it on your own domain at privacy.your-company.com via the Admin Dashboard. To do so, visit the "General Settings" tab on the left side menu and click on the drop down arrow next to "Privacy Center URL". Setting up the Privacy Center on your domain requires updating some DNS records in your DNS database, the instructions for which will be displayed when you expand the "Privacy Center URL" section.
There are 3 steps to fully launching the Privacy Center on your domain:
You can configure the email addresses, email aliases, and even the domains from which we send Privacy Center emails.
This diagram is labelled with the fields as configurable in the Email Settings:
| Location in diagram | Field name | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Email alias | The sender name visible in email clients |
| 2 | Email prefix | The local portion of the email address, prefixes the unique ID used for reliably tracing email replies. This is only configurable when custom Email Domains are configured |
| 3 | Reply To | The email address that will be used when the end-user replies to this email |
| 4 | Email Domain | The domain from which the email is sent |
These fields are configurable in two ways:
This configuration is static across all requests, and is split between two pages: Email Settings and Email Domains.
Based on the attributes present on each request, use the closest matching conditional email address configuration when sending Privacy Center emails.
There is also an additional field for conditional configurations: Email body display name. This field populates a special template variable which can be used in Email Templates as {{ prettySenderName }}. This is most often used when conditionally configuring emails to be sent from teams within your organization.
Conditional configurations take priority over the Global configuration when any attributes match. If multiple attributes match a request, then the configuration with the highest number of matching attributes is used, otherwise the lower priority is used, otherwise the first one alphabetically by internal name is used.
Anytime you make a change related to the Privacy Center, you will be able to save a draft before publishing updates via the toolbar at the top:
- Save Draft saves the current changes you have made
- Preview Draft Privacy Center shows your Privacy Center saved with the changes you made, or if no changes are made shows the publicly accessible privacy center
- View Live Privacy Center shows the currently live and public version of your Privacy Center that is accessible to users
- Review Changes & Publish starts the process of actually setting your changes live
When there are changes that have not been deployed live yet, there will be a green notification dot on the Review Changes & Publish button to alert you. Clicking that will open a modal displaying the detected changes you have made, organized into the following sections: Privacy Center, Policies, Messages, and Subjects. The sections where changes have been made are denoted with a red dot next to their tab title for explicit clarity.
Once you have reviewed and confirmed the changes in the previews, click the Set Privacy Center Live button at the bottom of the modal to officially deploy your updates. It is best practice to inspect your changes prior to setting them live in order to make sure all customizations were intended. Deploying changes may take up to five minutes to appear publicly to users; however you can view the updated version before and immediately after publishing via the Preview Draft Privacy Center button.
- Request certificate
In order for Transcend to host the Privacy Center on your domain, a certificate must first be requested that can authenticate the domain name
privacy.your-company.comand demonstrate that communication with the page is secure. - Validate DNS
The certificate in the previous step must then be validated, and traffic from your page
privacy.your-company.commust be routed to the Privacy Center. To do so, the "Privacy Center URL" section will display a couple DNS records that must be added to your DNS database. Your DNS provider will propagate the record changes, which may take some time. - Launch Privacy Center
When the certificate has been successfully validated and your domain
privacy.your-company.comcorrectly routes traffic to the new Privacy Center, click "Launch" to launch the Privacy Center at its new location!