Executive Summary
A leading global automotive manufacturer needed to govern consent for vehicle data tracking across hundreds of millions of users worldwide, including complex scenarios where a single user owned multiple vehicles and required granular, per-vehicle consent controls. Syrenis deployed its enterprise consent and preference management platform to centralize and manage these consent decisions at scale. All defined project goals were met, giving the organization a consistent, auditable foundation for responsible vehicle data use across its entire customer base.
Introduction
The client is one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers, operating across multiple regions and jurisdictions with a customer base spanning hundreds of millions of registered vehicle owners. As the organization expanded its connected vehicle capabilities, the volume, variety and regulatory sensitivity of the data it collected grew significantly.
Vehicle data, including GPS location, braking behavior, windshield wiper activation and other telematics signals, offers substantial value for product improvement, safety analysis and personalized services. It also carries significant privacy obligations. Managing how that data is collected, used and governed, across a global user base and in compliance with regulations including GDPR and CCPA, required a dedicated consent and preference management infrastructure.
The organization sought a platform capable of operating at enterprise scale, integrating with its existing technology ecosystem and supporting complex, customer-level consent logic without disrupting the vehicle or digital experience.
The Problem
The core challenge was consent management at a scale and complexity that most enterprise platforms are not designed to handle.
At the individual level, the organization needed to support scenarios where a single user owned and operated more than one vehicle. Each vehicle could collect different categories of data. A user might consent to full data collection when driving one vehicle, including GPS tracking, braking data and environmental sensor signals, while withholding consent for GPS tracking specifically when driving a second vehicle, while permitting all other data collection on that same vehicle.
This required the platform to:
- Maintain distinct consent records tied to both the individual user and each specific vehicle asset
- Apply granular, channel-level consent logic that reflected the user’s preferences per data type and per vehicle
- Ensure those preferences were accurately honored in real time across downstream systems
- Produce a complete, auditable record of every consent decision for regulatory and compliance purposes
Standard consent management solutions store consent at the user level or the device level. Neither approach supports the kind of per-asset, per-channel consent logic this organization required. Any solution that collapsed these distinctions would either over-collect data without valid consent, or block data collection unnecessarily, creating both compliance exposure and product limitations.
Beyond the technical complexity, the organization needed to manage these consent records across a global user base, multiple jurisdictions and a wide range of regulatory frameworks, all within an existing technology ecosystem that included CRM platforms, marketing systems, customer portals and connected vehicle infrastructure.
The Solution
Syrenis deployed its consent and preference management platform to address the full scope of the organization’s requirements, with particular focus on the multi-asset, multi-channel consent model at the heart of the project.
Per-Asset Consent Architecture. The platform’s data model supports consent records held against both a person (the data subject) and an object (the vehicle), with defined relationships between them. This allowed the organization to attach specific consent decisions to individual vehicles rather than only to the user account. A single user owning multiple vehicles could therefore hold different consent configurations across each asset, reflecting their specific preferences for each one.
Granular Channel-Level Consent. Within each vehicle’s consent record, the platform supports multiple levels of consent channel granularity. The organization configured individual channels for each data category, including GPS tracking, braking data and environmental sensor signals. Each channel operates independently, allowing users to grant or withhold consent at the data-type level rather than accepting or rejecting all vehicle data collection as a single decision.
Parent-child channel structures allowed implicit consent to flow where appropriate. Where a user granted consent to a parent category, the platform automatically applied that consent to the relevant sub-channels, in accordance with the defined business rules, reducing friction without compromising accuracy.
Real-Time Consent Querying and Enforcement. The platform’s high throughput API processes enables downstream systems to query consent status in real time before activating any data collection or processing activity. This ensured that every data collection event reflected the user’s current consent state, with no lag between a preference update and its application across connected systems.
The Connector Service synchronized preference changes across integrated downstream platforms in near real time, typically within one minute, ensuring consistency across the organization’s broader technology stack.
Auditability and Compliance. Every consent transaction was recorded in an immutable audit log, capturing the consent decision, the applicable privacy policy version, the data source and a full timestamp. This created a verifiable, regulator-ready record for every interaction, across every user and every vehicle in the system.
The platform also supported multi-jurisdictional configuration, presenting users with consent language and options appropriate to their location, in their language, and aligned to the applicable regulatory framework, whether GDPR, CCPA or other regional requirements.
Integration with Existing Systems. The platform was integrated into the organization’s existing customer portals, marketing systems and connected vehicle infrastructure using its REST API. Where legacy systems required it, batch data ingestion via file-based import was also available. The implementation was structured to align with the organization’s existing technology standards and agile delivery practices.
Results
All defined project goals were met across a user base of hundreds of millions of vehicle owners worldwide. The deployment established a governed, auditable consent infrastructure capable of handling per-vehicle, per-channel consent logic at a scale that standard enterprise platforms are not designed to support. For an organization operating across multiple jurisdictions, managing consent decisions tied to both individual users and specific vehicle assets, the outcomes represented a meaningful step forward in responsible data governance. Consent accuracy, real-time enforcement and regulatory readiness were all achieved without disrupting the connected vehicle experience or the organization’s existing technology ecosystem.
The organization now maintains accurate, per-vehicle consent records at global scale, with real-time querying and enforcement applied consistently across its connected vehicle and digital ecosystems. Each consent decision is resolved at the data-type level, tied to both the individual user and the specific vehicle asset, and propagated to downstream systems within minutes of any preference update. Users have transparent control over which data categories are collected on each of their vehicles, and those preferences are honored consistently whether the downstream system is a CRM platform, a marketing tool or a connected vehicle service. This consistency of enforcement across a user base spanning hundreds of millions of vehicle owners represents one of the most operationally significant outcomes of the deployment, reducing both the risk of unauthorized data collection and the overhead of manual consent reconciliation across integrated systems.
A complete, immutable audit trail supports regulatory inquiries, internal governance reviews and data subject access requests across all jurisdictions in which the organization operates. Every consent transaction is recorded with the applicable privacy policy version, the data source, the channel and a full timestamp, creating a verifiable record that can be produced on demand in response to a regulatory challenge or an individual rights request. For an organization operating across frameworks including GDPR and CCPA, this level of auditability reduces the time and operational effort required to respond to enforcement inquiries, supports accurate internal reporting, and provides compliance teams with a consistent, queryable record of every consent decision made across the global user base.
Beyond the technical outcomes, the implementation delivered meaningful improvements to the organization’s governance posture and operational confidence. Compliance teams gained a consistent, queryable record of consent decisions across all jurisdictions, reducing reliance on manual reconciliation processes and improving readiness for regulatory inquiries. The structured, per-vehicle consent architecture also created a scalable foundation for expanding connected vehicle services, giving product and data teams the confidence to introduce new data collection categories within a governed framework, without requiring changes to the underlying consent infrastructure. For an organization operating at this scale, the ability to extend consent coverage to new vehicle lines, regions or data types through configuration rather than re-engineering represents a durable operational advantage as connected vehicle capabilities continue to develop.
Conclusion
Managing vehicle data consent at enterprise scale is not a configuration challenge. It requires a platform built to hold consent against both people and assets, apply granular channel-level logic and enforce those decisions consistently across complex, integrated systems in real time.
For this organization, the requirement to support a single user’s different consent decisions across multiple owned vehicles illustrated precisely why generic consent management approaches are insufficient. The complexity is real, and the compliance implications of getting it wrong, at the scale of hundreds of millions of users, are significant.
Syrenis addressed that complexity through a flexible data model, a high-capacity API and a configurable channel structure that aligned with the organization’s specific consent requirements, without requiring the organization to compromise on either user experience or regulatory accuracy.
As connected vehicles collect an expanding range of data, and as privacy regulations continue to develop globally, the ability to govern consent at this level of granularity will only become more operationally important.
To see how Syrenis manages complex consent and preference requirements in regulated, high-volume environments, book a demo or speak to an expert.