Yvan Cohen
Mon May 12 2025
How LightRocket Simplifies Consent and Data Management
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko
In today’s data-driven world, privacy is a cornerstone of trust between organizations and their audiences. Whether you're managing thousands of digital assets or navigating complex legal frameworks, ensuring the security and compliance of personal data is no longer optional - it's essential.
In his dystopian novel 1984, British writer George Orwell introduced the concept of ‘Big Brother is watching you.’ Orwell’s ominous description of totalitarianism shows how private lives can be invaded by the all-seeing eye of the State.
While Orwell’s 1984 was fiction, today’s digital landscape makes data privacy a real concern for organizations. Understanding how to manage consent and data is now a competitive necessity.
The presence of technology sometimes seems so pervasive it feels like our phones are listening to us - that Orwell’s fictional ‘Big Brother’ has become modern-day reality.
All of which underscores just how valuable, and fragile, privacy is. And how vital the task of protecting it has become.
The Rise of Global Privacy Laws: GDPR and Beyond
Preserving privacy is increasingly seen as an issue of fundamental rights and freedom. In many democratic countries relatively new laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have been created to limit the collection of personal data and protect individual privacy.
Gone are the wild-west days when systems could simply store users’ personal data without responsibility or consequences. Stricter privacy laws are increasingly being adopted and enforced around the world.
In the realm of digital asset management (DAM), questions of privacy touch on the structure of our platforms and the functionality we offer users for managing consent.
Photo by Christina Morillo
How LightRocket Keeps Your Data Secure
At a system level, the requirements of privacy laws can be complex and far reaching. Their essence, however, is simple. It is the responsibility of a platform licensee (the end user, or in our case the responsibility falls on our clients), to ensure appropriate resources are deployed to respond to privacy concerns. Usually this means designating an ‘information officer’ whose task it will be to act on requests for data removal or respond to complaints from users relating to privacy.
It is LightRocket’s responsibility to provide our clients with the necessary security infrastructure to keep our users’ personal data safe. To this end we have deployed complex and extensive technical measures, monitored by a dedicated security specialist whose task it is to patrol the metaphorical ‘perimeter fence’ of our systems, to prevent breaches or data leaks.
Understanding Likeness Rights and Digital Consent
Beyond the technical and human resources needed to keep private data secure at a system level, LightRocket Enterprise includes built-in consent management tools that let clients link signed release forms to specific digital assets—making it easy to stay compliant with likeness rights laws.
In some countries, like France or Germany, individuals actually own their ‘likeness’ which means you can’t legally take a picture of somebody on the street without asking permission.
The days of freewheeling street photography are largely behind us, when icons like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Doisneau created an entire genre by taking candid pictures of people on the streets of Paris.
Increasingly, we are seeing clients asking subjects to grant consent by signing legal release forms which grant usage rights for their likeness in an image or video.
This is a laudable trend, but the sheer volume of documents this generates creates its own logistical challenges: how can consent forms be identified as unique types of assets? And how can pictures and videos be linked to them?
Example of a consent form linking to an image in your collection.
Consent Form Management with LightRocket DAM
LightRocket Enterprise’s unique consent form management tools provide a solution to these challenges. Using our DAM, you can tag, search, and link consent forms directly to photos or videos, making compliance traceable and verifiable with just one click.
From any asset with consent, the user is a click away from its corresponding consent form. Similarly, consent forms can be found using our search filters and are recognizable by their own unique ‘form’ icon.
At LightRocket we believe in the freedom of our clients to manage and respect privacy and personal data in every facet of their digital asset management operations. We understand that the protection of privacy is an increasing concern for organizations and individuals around the world. While technology has often eroded our privacy, it can also serve as a powerful tool for protection– as is the case with our DAM system.
Want to streamline privacy compliance without sacrificing productivity? Contact us today to see how LightRocket’s DAM platform can help you manage consent and protect personal data- efficiently and securely.
Written by Yvan Cohen | Yvan is a Co-Founder of LightRocket Enterprise and has spent the past two decades immersed in the challenges and realities of digital asset management. As a professional photojournalist, Yvan uses his decades of media experience to help shape LightRocket's world-class DAM platform; focusing on collaboration, intuitive workflows and continuous innovation.
