Full Answer

The pace of state-level privacy legislation has accelerated sharply. Between 2018 and 2023, five states passed comprehensive privacy laws. In the two years since, 16 more followed — bringing the total to 21. Each carries its own consent thresholds, data subject rights, and enforcement mechanisms, and none of them align perfectly. A WooCommerce store shipping to multiple states now faces overlapping requirements that differ on what counts as consent, how long data can be retained, and what qualifies as a deletion.

The practical problem is visibility. If your tracking infrastructure relies on third-party cookies and client-side scripts, you can't reliably prove what data you collected, where it went, or whether a visitor's deletion request was honoured end to end. Ad platforms ingest your visitor data through their own pipelines, and once it leaves your site you've lost the audit trail.

Server-side tracking changes that equation. When events route through your own first-party endpoint before reaching any platform, you control the pipeline — what gets collected, what gets forwarded, and what gets deleted. That auditability is what compliance actually requires: not just a consent banner, but a data path you can document and defend. The 24 Carat Data Standard scores durability and portability as two of five purity dimensions — both are privacy prerequisites.